Gregory David Roberts

Sometimes, you have to surrender before you win

We are made out of stars, you and I.

It’s a fact of life on run that you often love more people than you trust. For people in the safe world, of course, exactly the opposite is true. - Lin

Being in love we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it's said”

"Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things."

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no color, or accent, or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul cannot be stilled.

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.

What characterizes the human race more,’ Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?’ I thought the question was acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

In prison, a man rations his smiles because predatory men see smiling as a weakness, weak men see it as an invitation, and prison guards see it as a provocation to some new torment.

"Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit."