Shantaram

I’ve been reading Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram over the past months and have found some amazing stories and quotes throughout. The book is about an Australian man who escaped a New Zealand prison and fled to India to seek refuge. Shantaram has many interesting stories and niches that even after 500 pages of reading, it still draws me to read it more. Below I’ve extracted some quotes throughout that I enjoyed.

“She loved the guy. She did it for him. She would’ve done anything for him. Some women are like that. Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that, from 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 girls here. I think that’s why I’m sick of love.”

“Sometimes, even with the purest of intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.
Ask any man with a long enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a mans heart is a system of justice”

“Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become.”

“Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice. We concentration our laws, investigations, prosecutions and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is the the crime. In all of these things, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes.”

“Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what the feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way around.”

“Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who w are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.”

“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 on is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”

“Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul. That chemical absolution is paid for, like everything else in the universe, with light.”

“Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who wont change his mind and can’t change the subject.”

“You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.”