These are some of the lines in Shantaram I really liked. May be because they say the truth or may be they find a resonance with my views or may be simply because they are so witty.
- The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.
- 'Well, 'he puffed, 'a man had to draw the line somewhere. Civilization after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.'
- Karla is reasonably good at being as a friend, but she is stupendously good at being an enemy. When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities both as a friend and as a enemy.
- The first rule of black business everywhere is: Never let anyone know what you are thinking. Didlier’s corollary to the rule was: always know what the others think of you.
- “Truth is a bully we all pretend to like.” – Karla
- Most loves are like that, from what I 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 – you friends, everyone you used to know. And its still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it.. I have seen this happen to a lot of ..
- Ask any man with a long enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden to a man’s heart is a system of justice.
- There is nothing strange in this.. I say it from a long experience of this country, and especially of this city(Mumbai). It happens often, and easily, for the Indians. That is how they manage to live together, a billion of them in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another.
- There’s a dark feeling – less than hatred, but more than loathing – that ugly men feel for handsome men. It’s unreasonable and unjustified, of course, it’s always there, hiding in the long shadow’s thrown by envy. It creeps out, into the light of your eyes, when you are falling in love with a beautiful woman.
- 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.
- Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India.
- If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke.
- “There is no believing in God,’ he declared, smiling again. ‘We either know God, or we do not.’
- Madam Zhou laughed. It was a gurgling, bronchial laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hunted down funny things, and killed them stone dead.
- People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him,
- ‘I love him my boy, because he is a mooring post in this city. Thousands of people find safety by tying their lives to his. I love him because he has the task, where other men do not even have the dream, of changing the whole world.
- ‘You know, Lin, ‘he said softly, ‘we have a saying in Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give you 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.’
- Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but its worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.
- “It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.”
- I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way round.’
- For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on for ever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on for ever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.’
- I didn’t know then as I do now, that love’s a one way street. Love like respect, isn’t something you get; it is something you give.
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