# Quote — Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

> 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.

- Author: [Gregory David Roberts](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-david-roberts.md)
- Book: [Shantaram](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-david-roberts/shantaram.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shantaram#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-david-roberts/shantaram/i-was-a-revolutionary

## More from this book

> The only victory that really counts in prison is survival.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-david-roberts/shantaram/the-only-victory.md)

> Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from them, the more you wish they’d never happened. - Karla

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-david-roberts/shantaram/mistakes-are-like.md)

> Men wage war for profit or principle, but they fight them for land and women.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-david-roberts/shantaram/men-wage-war.md)