Цитаты из книги Шантарам

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again.

Fate always gives you two choices: the one that you should take and the one you do.

Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.

A man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That's what it is all about. That's the most important thing in the world.

If we cannot respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.

Love makes men big, and hate makes them small.

You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.

The fully mature man or woman has about two seconds left to live.

Prison had given us an intimate acquintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed that we'd learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.

A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself.

For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.

There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me.

A man has to respect himself before he can respect anyone else.

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.

Mistakes are like bad loves: the more you learn from them, the more you wish they'd never happened.

I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.

It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've anhiliated 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.

I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that sufferring is a human weakness.