Top 200 Gregory David Roberts Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

202. “It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.”

— Gregory David Roberts

203. “Qasim Ali said that night, his bark-coloured eyes softening on the two young men, ’because justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.”

— Gregory David Roberts

204. “But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one.”

— Gregory David Roberts

205. “Alone is current in truth’s river, like togetherness. Alone has its own fidelity. But when you navigate that closer view of the shore, it often seems that faith you have in yourself is all the faith there is.”

— Gregory David Roberts

206. “What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.”

— Gregory David Roberts

207. “I joked and laughed about things that made other less wounded hearts weep, and I’d learned to harden myself against loss and death.”

— Gregory David Roberts

208. “You can respect a man’s rights or opinions without knowing the man at all. But you can only respect the man himself when you find something in him that’s worthy of the word.”

— Gregory David Roberts

209. “An amateur is anyone who hasn’t learned how not to do it,’ I said.”

— Gregory David Roberts

210. “Fanaticism is the opposite of love. A wise man once told me – he’s a Muslim, by the way – that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion.”

— Gregory David Roberts

211. “Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost.”

— Gregory David Roberts

212. “But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn’t join it. I’m not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it. And.”

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

214. “Nobody who has done business in any country with an Indian would doubt the shrewdness of Indians, but what Indian people bring to the world is something special and unique, which is the capacity for a loving interaction.”

— Gregory David Roberts

215. “Good is only half the truth, and truth is only half the story.”

— Gregory David Roberts

216. “Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work.”

— Gregory David Roberts

217. “Cowardece is often just another name for being taken by surprise.”

— Gregory David Roberts

218. “Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from, the more you wish they’d never happened.”

— Gregory David Roberts

219. “But I always connected to the people and the purity of their faith, rather than the religious code they followed.”

— Gregory David Roberts

220. “But the past has a way of taking you to the right place at the wrong time, and that can be a storm inside.”

— Gregory David Roberts

221. “The more slender your grip on reality, the more dangerous the world becomes. On the other hand, the more rational the world you find yourself in, the more carefully it must be questioned.”

— Gregory David Roberts

222. “I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life.”

— Gregory David Roberts

223. “Divorce is healthier than the stock exchange, and way more predictable.”

— Gregory David Roberts

224. “If the hour comes, and there’s no-one to beg or blame but yourself, you learn that what we have in the end is just a handful more than what was born in us. That unique handful, what we add to what we are, is the only story of us that isn’t told by someone else.”

— Gregory David Roberts

225. “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.”

— Gregory David Roberts

226. “Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year’s dust and blood from the mountain.”

— Gregory David Roberts

227. “His simple, unbeautiful words were the clearest expression of what all prisoners, and everyone else who lives long enough, know well – that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we’ve lost. When we’re young, we think that suffering is something that’s done to us. When we get older – when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another – we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.”

— Gregory David Roberts

228. “Hatred always leaves a stain on the veil. But sometimes the hatred isn’t your own. Sometimes you’re chained, and the hatred beaten into you is another man’s, grown in a different heart, and it takes longer than a fading bruise to forget.”

— Gregory David Roberts

229. “That was one lesson he should’ve learned the first time. We don’t, of course. It’s okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn’t need love at all.”

— Gregory David Roberts

230. “Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn’t be of our making, but that wouldn’t occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.”

— Gregory David Roberts

231. “Instinct chooses her own children.”

— Gregory David Roberts

232. “FORTY-SEVEN We found Diva in a shriek of Divas, in the lobby of the President hotel. The three of them stopped, staring at us with well-practised aghast. Didier was in a rumpled, white linen jacket and.”

— Gregory David Roberts

233. “Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it?”

— Gregory David Roberts

234. “But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.”

— Gregory David Roberts

235. “Men don’t like to be that honest about love: to put the gun in a woman’s hand, and hold it against their own hearts, and say, Here, this is how you kill me. But it was okay. It was okay.”

— Gregory David Roberts

236. “I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

237. “We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast.”

— Gregory David Roberts

238. “Her beauty was injured by the wound but not ravaged by it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

239. “India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.”

— Gregory David Roberts