You Never Really Know a Man Until You Stand in His Shoes and Walk Around in Them Page Number

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Shantaram is a 2003 novel written by Gregory David Roberts, in which a convicted Australian depository financial institution robber and heroin addict who escaped from Pentridge Prison house flees to India where he lived for 10 years.

Quotes [edit]

• It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know most love and fate and the choices we make, only the eye of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and existence tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, encarmine helplessness, I was even so costless: gratis to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you lot have got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, betwixt antisocial and forgiving,tin go the story of your life.

• I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in law-breaking, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum security prison house. When I escaped from that prison house, over the front end wall, between 2 gun towers, I became my state's most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on 3 continents, beaten, stabbed and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men effectually me died. They were better men than I am, well-nigh of them; better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the incorrect 2d of someone else'southward hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, also many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
• There is a difference between the dishonest bribe and the honest bribe. The dishonest ransom is the same in every country, but the honest bribe is Bharat's alone. - Didier Levy
• I was going through deep and silent h2o. Nothing and no-one could brand me happy. Nothing and no-ane could brand me pitiful. I was tough. Which is probably the saddest affair you tin can say about a homo.

• In that location's a truth deeper than feel. It'south beyond what nosotros see, or even what we feel. It's an lodge of truth that separates the profound from the but clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face up of it; and the price of knowing it, like the price of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. Information technology doesn't e'er help us to dearest the earth, but it does foreclose us from hating the world. And the only manner to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, merely as Prabhakar told it to me, merely as I'grand telling it to you lot at present.

• "Most loves are like that ... Y'all heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to go along it adrift, and your self-respect and independence. Subsequently a while, you start throwing people out - your friends, everyone you used to know. And information technology'southward yet not enough. The lifeboat is nonetheless sinking, and you know it'south going to take you lot down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of girls here. That'south why I'thou sick of love."

• Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a vocaliser when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, nutrient is the music inside the torso and music is the nutrient inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every human being a poet, a princess of peasant daughter if only for second optics of man and woman meets.

• I stood in the harsh electric light of that new tunnel, in Mumbai's Arthur Road Prison house, and I wanted to express joy. Hey guys, I wanted to say, can't you be a little more original? Just I couldn't speak. Fear dries a man's rima oris, and hate strangles him. That'south why hate has no great literature: real fear and real detest have no words.

• Fate gives all of united states of america three teachers, 3 friends, 3 enemies, and three nifty loves in our lives. Just these twelve are always disguised, and nosotros can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them.

• That's how we continue this crazy place together - with the middle.... India is the eye. It'due south the heart that keeps united states together. There's no identify with people, like my people, Lin. In that location's no heart like the Indian heart.

• I know at present that it's the sweet, sweating olfactory property of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and information technology's a sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.

• The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the night ane, full of things we didn't practice or say.

• I of the reasons why we require love, & seek it so desperately, is that love is the just cure for loneliness, & shame, & sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness tin can assistance you detect them again. Some truths nearly yourself are and then painful that merely shame can help you live with them. And some things are merely and so sad that only your soul tin can practice the crying for you.

• Sometimes we dearest with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we weep with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is. Love & its duty, sorrow & its truth. In the end that'due south all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn.

• The difference betwixt news and gossip-News tells you what people did, gossip tells y'all how much they enjoyed it.

• Every solar day, when y'all are on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

• If fate doesn't make you laugh, then you don't get the joke.

• Cypher grieves more than deeply or pathetically than one half of a bang-up beloved that isn't meant to be.

• It's a characteristic of human nature that the all-time qualities, called up chop-chop in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm.

• One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why nosotros prize information technology and then highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

• Lovers notice their mode past insights and confidences; they are the stars they use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The about precious souvenir y'all tin bring to your lover is your suffering.

• At that place's no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.

• The sane man is simply a better liar than an insane homo.

• Fate's way of beating the states in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, just never heed.

• The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said, 'It is the deeds that take goodness or badness in them. At that place are good deeds and there are bad deeds. Men are just men —it is what they exercise, or pass up to do, that links them to good or evil. The truth is that an instant of existent beloved, in the heart of anyone —the noblest of human being alive or the most wicked— has the whole purpose and process and significant of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of united states of america, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.

• Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we utilise on ourselves, and love is often the bract; but it's worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets almost of usa, in the end.

• If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using information technology on yourself.

• Despotism despises cypher then much as righteousness in its victims.

• At kickoff, when we truly beloved someone, our greatest fearfulness is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread instead is that we won't terminate loving them, even after they are expressionless and gone.

• A dream is a place where a wish and a fear come across. When the wish and fear are exactly the same, nosotros call the dream a nightmare.

• Men reveal what they call back when they await away, and what they experience when they hesitate. With women, it'south the other fashion around.

• Happiness is a myth, which was invented to brand the states buy things.

• The lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

• We know that crying is a expert and natural matter. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of forcefulness. Nonetheless, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

• A expert man is as strong every bit the right woman needs him to be.

• Annihilation that can be put in a nutshell should remain at that place.

• Fate ever gives you ii choices, the one yous should have, and the 1 you do.

• The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Almost of the time, the best nosotros tin do is wrap it effectually ourselves for condolement or drag it behind u.s. equally we struggle to go on.

• Sometimes we see the past so conspicuously, and read the fable of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and the kind of message enfolded in it.

• There is no man, and no place, without a war. The only affair we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice nosotros get - who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.

• Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.

• Nix in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow.

• You are not a human being until yous requite your love, truly and freely to a child. And yous are not a adept man until you earn the dear, truly and freely, of a child in return"

• Existence in love we oft pay no attending whatsoever to the substance of what lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy past the way it's said"

• "Be true to love where ever you find it, and exist true to yourself and everything that you really are."

• The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

• "We all strive to do i good matter to balance all the wrong that we take done in the past"

• There'southward no believing in God...Nosotros either know God, or we don't.

• Sometimes, y'all have to surrender earlier yous win

• "Silence is the tortured man'due south revenge."

• "Nobody is ever naked in India. And especially, nobody is naked without apparel.
  Then...how practice you take a shower?
  Past wearing the over-underpants over underpants."

• "Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things."

• For this is what nosotros do. Put one foot forrard and so the other. Elevator our eyes to the snarl and smile of the earth once again. Call up. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and bleed the globe. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another nighttime. Push button our brave hearts into the promise of a new solar day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our ain. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, nosotros live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

• The fully mature man, has almost two seconds left to live.

• "Civilization, after all, is divers past what we forbid, more than than what we allow."

• Optimism is the first cousin of dearest, and it's exactly like dearest in three ways; it'southward pushy, it has no existent sense of humour and it turns up where you least expect it.

• The real fob in life is to want nix, and to succeed in getting it.

• People always hurt united states of america with their trust. The surest fashion to hurt someone you like is to put all your trust in him."

• "Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of human who carried his by in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken centre. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have sure characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that'south establish in the worst sorrow. They're honest, considering the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie. They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it. And they're lonely. Well-nigh of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something nosotros tin share. But the past for ever 1 of u.s. is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who discover themselves marooned in that location, are always lone" ~page 443 - 444

• Dream is the place where a wish and a fear encounter. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, nosotros call the dream a nightmare. - Didier

• I hate information technology when people take so long to drink a single drinking glass. Information technology is like putting a safety to masturbate. - Didier

• It's a fact of life on run that you often love more people than y'all trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the reverse is truthful. - Lin

• Subject field and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair. - Lin

• Mistakes are like bad loves, the more y'all larn from them, the more you wish they'd never happened. - Karla

• Prison house systems are similar black holes for human bodies: no lite escapes from them, and no news.
• Prisons are the temples where devils learn to pray. Every time we turn the primal we twist the pocketknife of fate, because every time nosotros cage a human we close him in with hate.
• In prison, a man rations his smiles because predatory men see grin as a weakness, weak men run across it every bit an invitation, and prison house guards see information technology as a provocation to some new torment.
• The just victory that really counts in prison is survival.
• Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry they are not lone, and causing pain is how they grieve.

• Rule number ane of street fighting - stand up your ground and never walk backwards, unless you're preparing a counter-strike. Dominion number two - never put your head down. Rule number 3 - e'er become crazier than the other guy. Rule number four - always go on something in reserve. - Lin

• "In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss. Strictly Neutral." - Didier

• The merely force more ruthless and contemptuous than the business of large politics is the politics of big business.

• Now, sadly, there is all attitude and no style. It is the marker of the age in which we alive that the style becomes the attitude instead of the attitude becoming the style.

• Sometimes the lion must roar, but to remind the equus caballus of his fearfulness.

• A politician is someone who promises you a span, fifty-fifty when at that place is no river.

• What characterizes the human race more,' Karla once asked me, 'cruelty or the chapters to experience shame for information technology?' I thought the question was acutely clever and then, when I kickoff heard it, but I'm lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn't cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness there would be no history. Without that hope, in that location would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an human activity 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 dearest, and we beloved because nosotros can forgive.

• There is aught so depressing as good advice, and I will exist pleased if you lot exercise not inflict information technology upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at y'all. You must know this, surely? Some years agone I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of skillful advice that I was depressed for six months afterwards. Information technology was a very close phone call - I nearly never recovered.

• There's no fauna in the world with a deeper sense of parody than a equus caballus. A true cat can make you lot expect clumsy and a domestic dog tin brand you expect stupid, but only a horse can make you expect both at the same time. And and then, with goose egg more than the flick of a tail or a casual stomp on your foot, it lets yous know that it did in on purpose.

• Nosotros don't actually know what a pleasure information technology is to run in our ain language until we are forced to stumble in someone else'southward.

• Men wage state of war for turn a profit or principle, but they fight them for country and women.

• For what is dearest if not the promise to forgive? - Lin

• I'd lost my closest friends in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says Yous are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways similar co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and reasons for loving them.

• "He would have made a good soldier."
  I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn't just meek, information technology seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn't imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn't know and so that expert soldiers are defined past what they tin endure, not by what they can inflict.

• Nosotros are fabricated out of stars, yous and I.

• Optimism is the first cousin of honey and it is exactly like dearest in three means: information technology's pushy, it has no existent sense of humor, and information technology shows up where you lot least expect it.

• But the soul has no culture. The soul has no color, or accent, or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is ane. And when the eye has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul cannot be stilled.

External links [edit]

frypulded.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shantaram

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