SHANTARAM: Chapters 37-42
The final quotes from the fabulous book by Gregory David Roberts
*There was that elated moment I’d called glorious as I ran into the guns: that stupid was of lives. There wasn’t any glory in it. There never is. There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun.
*Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future.
*My dear friend, you can stand to eat a meal—if you must—and you can stand to make love—if you are able—but it is impossible to stand and drink whisky. It is the act of a barbarian. A man who stands up to drink a noble alcohol like whisky, in all but a toast to some noble thing or purpose, is a beast—a man who will stop at nothing.
*She had been beautiful once. It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn’t nourished by some goodness from within. And she wasn’t beautiful then, in that moment. She was ugly. She was beaten and broken and finished. She was floating on the black lake, and soon the dark water would drag her under. There was a deep silence where her mind used to be, and blank, uncraving emptiness where once her cruel and scheming life had ruled. Standing there, invisible to her, I was astonished and bewildered to realize I felt not angry or vengeful, but ashamed. I felt ashamed that I’d filled my heart with revenge. The part of me that wanted to—What? Had I really wanted to kill her?—was the very part that was like her. I looked at her, and I knew that I was looking at myself, my own future, my destiny, if I couldn’t rid my heart of its vindictiveness.
*It was foolish, and, like most guilt, it only told one half of the story.
*The host—our bodies—and the viruses—any bug that makes us sick—are locked in a competition with each other. When the parasite attacks, the host develops a defense. Then the virus changes to beat that defense, so the host gets a new defense. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen contest. It’s from the story ‘ Alice in Wonderland.’ Alice meets this Red Queen, who runs incredibly fast but never seems to get anywhere. She tells Alice that, in her country, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
*He was a natural leader but, like many men who have the gift of command and the instinct to rule, he was deeply troubled by every expression of the leadership art. He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honorable man.
*Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honor is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honorable way and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honor is the art of being humble.
*You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.
*I’m not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.
*I could feel her eyes on my like a blush of shame.
*I looked at all those white sculptures, and I thought, that’s what I am. That’s what I’ve always been. All my life. Negative space. Always waiting for someone, or something, or some kind of real feeling to fill me up and give me a reason.
*It’s bad, loving someone you can’t forgive.
*The word MAFIA comes from the Sicilian word for BRAGGING. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he’ll tell you it’s just that—the boasting, the pride—that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn. Maybe it’s not possible to be an outlaw without being proud in some way.
*And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.
*Fate always gives you two choices: the one you should take, and the one you do.
*Oh Lord and Lady—infinite yin-yang spirit in the sky, we humbly ask you to hear the prayers, today, of five souls that you put into the world, and left in the temporary care of our bodies.
*“Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash.” Sadiq Khan
*The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reasons and their right to be.
*I know now that when the loving, honest moments comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.
*Heroes only come in three kinds; dead, damaged, or dubious.
*I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.
*To survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest. That was the source of their purity: above all things, they were true to themselves.
*The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.
*There is no man, and no place, without war. The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get—who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.
*Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.
*Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.
*No matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
*This is what we do. Put one food forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for the truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.
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