Shantaram!

• I dont know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it (Karla)
• Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything exept 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
• Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things (Karla)
• Happiness is a myth. it was invented to make us buy things (Karla)
• And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificient and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love were a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.
• 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 they give to us, even those dreaded and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.
• 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. (Didier)
• Nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
• There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.
• Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.
• 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.
• 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.
• One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.
• You do what God should do: you give me a reason to live. You give me a reason to love the world.
• She loved the guy. She did it for him. She would’ve done anything for him. Some people are like that. Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out—your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it. I’ve seen that happen to a lot of people here. I think that’s why I’m sick of love.
• They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
• 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, but the heart of it came to be in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured
• The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true.
• If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth…It was impossible to tell from that photo how much those men had loved to laugh, and how readily they’d smiled…only my own eyes stared back at me as I held the picture in my bandaged hands, and remembered the names of the men leaning together in the ragged lines.
• I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun towers, I became my country’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 three continents, beaten, stabbed and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them; better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else’s hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.
• There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any hear would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.
• Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them.
• That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart.... India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people, like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the INDIAN HEART.
• 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, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free 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 its all you have got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving,can become the story of your life.
• I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and its a sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.
• The sane man is simply a better liar than an insane man.
• A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.
• Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.
• Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow.
• 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”
• Being in love we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way its said”
• Optimism is the first cousin of love, and its exactly like love in three ways; its pushy, it has no real sense of humor and it turns up where you least expect it.
• The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.
• People always hurt us with their trust. The surest way to hurt someone you like is to put all your trust in him.”
• Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened. - Karla