Shantaram Quotes – Part One: Gregory David Roberts

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make…” Part 1, Chapter 1.

“…but the heart of it came to me in an instant… I was free… It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But… when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.” Part 1, Chapter

“So it begins, this story, like everything else – with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.” Part 1, Chapter

“As the kilometres wound past, as the hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, and tens of thousands, my spirit writhed. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. If you feel it at all, it’s a lacerating guilt, that first confrontation with the wretched of the earth… Then the smoulders of shame and guilt flamed into anger, became fist-tightening rage at the unfairness of it: What kind of a government, I thought, what kind of a system allows suffering like this?” Part 1, Chapter

“…a stutter of traffic” Part 1, Chapter

“I was free. Every day, when you’re on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.” Part 1, Chapter

“But strangers that we were then, we stood for five long seconds and held the stare, while all the parallel worlds, all the parallel lives that might’ve been, and never would be, whirled around us.” Part 1, Chapter

“The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.” Part 1, Chapter

“But more than that, my eyes were drawn to her perfect loveliness. I looked at her, a stranger, and every other breath strained to force its way from my chest. A clamp like a tightening fist seized my heart. A voice in my blood said yes, yes, yes … The ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she’s loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know he by her wings – the wings that only we can see – and because wanting her kills every other desire of love. The same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, some times, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because it isn’t wise.” Part 1, Chapter

“Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny’s walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those.” Part 1, Chapter