Here are more quotes from this amazing book.
SHANTARAM: Chapter 13-18
*Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy things.
*Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it. She was such a woman. There was terrible anguish written in the rivulets of those tears and the torments that creased her face.
*We are like a debating society here, you see. We meet every month, at least one time, and when our business and private matters are finished, we talk about philosophical subjects and the suchlike. It’s our amusement.
*Why do people suffer? Why do bad people suffer so little? And why do good people suffer so much?
*I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that suffering is a human weakness.
*Is it not also true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardships makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering, cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much? And if that is true, does that not mean that your argument is the same thing as saying that we have to be weak to suffer, and we have to suffer to be strong, so we have to be weak to be strong?
*I think it is to do with growing up and becoming adults; learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realization. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering.
*I know that suffering is the truth. I know that suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end—the end that the master holds in his hand. People are born to suffer; and it never stops. Not for a second. Suffering comes from the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it’s the same place where those feelings and ideals die. The suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep.
*Happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down.
*I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonizingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is a test of our love for God.
*The Holy Koran tells us that all things in the universe are related, one to another, and that even opposites are united in some way. Pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain. The difference between them is this: that what we learn from pain—for example, that fire burns and is dangerous—is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people.
*Suffering is exactly like happiness, but backwards. One is the mirror image of the other, and has no real meaning or existence without the other.
*Suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we’ve lost. When we’re young, we think that suffering is something that’s done to us. When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.
*Hey, Prabu. Tell me, what is suffering? “Is easy—suffering is hungry, isn’t it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering.”
*People always hurt us with their trust; the surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.
*Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child.
*Like most things, and most people, it’s not as bad as it looks from the outside.
*Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman’s thigh. No flower, feather, or fabric can match the velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It’s a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.
*I always tell the truth, even when I’m lying.
*Wealth and power, in a city where half the many millions were homeless, were measured by the privacy that only money could buy, and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce. The poor were almost never alone and I was poor.
*I belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. Worse than that, I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and flight. I’d lost everyone—all the things that had defined me. Like all fugitives, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of myself. But there were a few people who could reach me: heroes of chaos who propped up the collapsible city with bamboo sticks, and insisted on loving their neighbors, no matter how far they’d fallen; no matter how broken or unlovely they were. But why them, why these few people—the richest and the most wretched, educated and illiterate, virtuous and criminal, old and young—it seemed that the only thing they had in common was a power to make me feel…something.
*I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.
*I felt myself to be at the mercy of personalities that were stronger, or at least more mysterious, than my own. I felt the irresistible draw and drift of a tide that was carrying me to someone else’s destination, someone else’s destiny. All of us were refugees, survivors. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed.
*Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.
*The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The evil men are the power—the rich men, and the politicians, and the fanatics of religion—whose decisions rule the world, and set it on its course of greed and destruction. The stupid men are the soldiers and policemen who enforce the rule of the evil men. They are often brave, I’m sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down or abandon them, in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars. And the cowards are the bureaucrats and paper shufflers and pen-pushers who permit the rule of evil men, and look the other way. They are managers, and officials, and mayors, and officers of the court. They always defend themselves by saying that they are just following orders, or just doing their job, and it’s nothing personal. They are the hundred million cowards who know what is going on, but say nothing, while they sign the paper that condemns one million men to the slower death of a famine. So that’s it: The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told.
*You are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.
*News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.
*When we ac, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn’t be of our making, but that wouldn’t occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs were caused by people who tried to change things for the best.
*He was saved. That was the look in his eyes as he nodded his head. That look combined shame and exultation because both are essential—shame gives exultation its purpose and exultation gives shame its reward. We’d saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.
*What characterizes the human race more: cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it? It isn’t cruelty or shame that characterize the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us who we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.
*For a little while ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears.
*I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.
*I was different, forever, just for the sight of her. And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it, from that moment onward.
*Life probably began inside the ocean. But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we carry the oceans, in our tears.
*It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.
*One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.
*Through those hours of fear and suffering and death, I found new ways and reasons to like the woman I already loved with all my heart.
*Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those starts are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.
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