An ode to Shantaram

Sharing a few quotes from the greatest book I have ever read - Shantaram.

For those who came in late, Shantaram is the story of Gregory David Roberts, who shares his life experiences of living in Bombay after he escaped from an Australian jail. His life in Bombay took him from the streets of colaba to the mountains of Afghanistan where he fought against the Russians. In between he fell in love, worked for the mafia and went to a jail and even started a medical clinic in a slum.

• Truth is a bully that we all pretend to like (Karla)
• I dont know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it (Karla)
• Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things (Karla)
• It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions.
  
• One of the ironies of courage and why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for somone else than we do for ourselves alone
• Happiness is a myth. it was invented to make us buy things (Karla)
• Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow.
  
• Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.
• Sometimes you love only with hope, sometimes, you cry without tears. Someetimes, thats all that is left, to cling together till the dawn.
• The past reflects eternally between two mirrors -the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.
• We know who we are and define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them
• You can never tell what people have inside them, until you start taking it away
• A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.
• Silence is the tortured mans revenge
• If fate doesn’t make you laugh, you just don’t get the joke
• Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around.
• News is about what people do. Gossip is about how they enjoyed doing it.
• Nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
• Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp; and worry that gets most of us, in the end.
• Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.
• There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.
• At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread instead is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone.
• The biggest problem with corruption as a form of government, is that it works so well.
• People haven’t stopped beleiving in love. They have stopped wanting to be in love. They just dont beleive in happy endings anymore. They still beleive in love, and falling in love but now they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin
• Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to ;et them work it out themselves

Got any more of your own to share...do that in the comments below this post.