Shantaram Quotes

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”

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

“We have a saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.”

″‘What characterizes the human race more?‘, Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it?‘”

“I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are.”

“Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions.”

“At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone.”

“Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”

“What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.”

“I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.”

“It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity... everything in the universe is moving towards it. And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to, is what I choose to call God. If you don’t like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it.”

″...it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you.”

“Whatever the case, whether they discovered that peace or created it, the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.”