Shantaram

"Nobody is ever naked in India. And especially, nobody is naked without clothes. So...how do you take a shower? By wearing the over-underpants over underpants."

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

"For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on."

"The fully mature man, has about two seconds left to live."

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

"Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways; it's 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.”"

""Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie. They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it. And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for ever one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone" ~page 443 - 444"

"Dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare. - Didier"

"I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting a condom to masturbate. - Didier"

"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"

"Discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair. - Lin"

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

"Prison systems are like black holes for human bodies: no light escapes from them, and no news."

"Prisons are the temples where devils learn to pray. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate."

"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."

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

"Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry they are not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve."

"Rule number one of street fighting - stand your ground and never walk backwards, unless you’re preparing a counter-strike. Rule number two - never put your head down. Rule number three - always get crazier than the other guy. Rule number four - always keep something in reserve. - Lin"

"“In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss. Strictly Neutral.” - Didier"

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

"Now, sadly, there is all attitude and no style. It is the mark of the age in which we live that the style becomes the attitude instead of the attitude becoming the style."

"Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear."

"A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there is no river."

"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."

"There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterwards. It was a very close call - I almost never recovered."

"There’s no animal in the world with a deeper sense of parody than a horse. A cat can make you look clumsy and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time. And then, with nothing more than the flick of a tail or a casual stomp on your foot, it lets you know that it did in on purpose."

"We don’t really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we are forced to stumble in someone else’s."

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

"For what is love if not the promise to forgive? - Lin"

"I'd lost my closest friends in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and reasons for loving them."

""He would have made a good soldier." I raised my eyebrows in greater surprise. Modena wasn't just meek, it seemed to me then, he was a weak man. I couldn't imagine what Abdullah meant. I didn't know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict."

"We are made out of stars, you and I."

"Optimism is the first cousin of love and it is exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and it shows up where you least expect 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."