Artistic Footprint

While reading the book Shantaram by Australian author Gregory David Roberts, I simply had to fold a corner over when I read a great quote. These quotes are worth more than just space on my hard drive, so here they are:

lin: A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.

Karla: The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in them

Lin:  Lovers find their way be such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

Lin: (hate and vengeance) Lin had to forgive the prison guards for their brutal discipline in order to survive. If he hated them, they would have killed him. That saved him from hating the whole nation that “breeds” such brutality, and resorted to hating the one person that caused him to be there and be beaten. Khaled hates israelis and jews because of who they are and what they do. he hates their nation.

Khader: The universe, this universe that we know of, began in absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex fore about 15 billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex. It is moving toward … something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. WE might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet might not get there, to that ultimate complexity. But we are all moving towards it-Everything in the universe is moving towards it. And that final complexity, I call god. anothing that becomes more simple is something evil, whereas something that helps us towards complexity is good.

“This is the way Justice is done” Qasim Ali said that night, his bark-coloured eyes sofening 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.

lin: The size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when the hesitate. With women, she said. it’s the other way around.

Karla says that depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.

Khader: “well she is wrong!” he declared. “I am an expert in the tristese. It is the perfect, definitive human performance. There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art.”

Didier: “Ah yes he loved me. I loved him. it was true, but he made me error of the judgement. He gave me love a test. He allowed me to discover the secret place where he kept a large sum of cash. I could not resist the temptation that he offered to me. I took the money and ran away. I loved him, but I took his money, and I ran away. For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is not test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.”

Khader: doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. killing a murderer. it is wrong to kill, but for the right reasons, you killing the murderer saves an innocent life.

Lisa: “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.”

Khader: Khaderbai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

“In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict. those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live,who kills just to survive, will usually come out on top. If the killer-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.”

Karla: If we all learned what we should have learned the first time around, we wouldn’t need love at all.

Didier: The fully mature man or woman, has about 2 seconds left to live.

Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return.

Abdullah: Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

Lin: “love makes men big, and hate makes men small.”

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

Lin: “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. Winston Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.”

We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain. Cheif among them is the endorphin group. The endorphins are peptide neurotransmitters that have pain relieving properties. Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natual coping mechanism. When you take any of the opiates – morphine, or opium or heroin, in particular – the body stops producing endorphins. When we  stop taking opiates, there’s a lag of between five and fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle. In the meanwhile, in that black, tortured crawlspace of one to two weeks without heroin and without endorphins, we learn what anxiety and stress pain really are.
“What’s it like”, karla asked me once, “cold turkey off heroin?” I tired to explain it. Think about every time in your life that you’ve ever been afraid, really afraid. Someone sneaks up behind you when you think you’re alone, and shouts to frighten you. The gang of thugs closes in around you. You fall from a great height in a dream, or you stand on the very edge of a steep cliff. Someone holds you under water and you feel the breath gone, and you scramble, fight, and claw your way to the suface. you lose control of the car and the wall rushing into your soundless shout. Then add them all up, all those chest-tightening terrors, and feel them all at once, all at the same time, hour after hour, and day after day, and think of every pain you’ve ever known – the burn of hot oil, the sharp sliver of glass, the broken bone, the gravel rash when you fell on the rough road in winter, the headache and the earache and the toothache. Then add them all up, all those groin squeezing, stomach-tensing shrieks of pain, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, day after day. Then think of every anguish you’ve ever known. Remember the death of a loved one, Remember a lover’s rejection, recall your feelings of failure and shame and unspeakably bitter remorse. And add them all up, all the heart stabbing griefs and miseries, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, day after day. That’s cold turkey. Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away.

I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or woman until I owed them more than I could repay. People like karla saw goodness with a glance, while I stared, and stared, and too often saw nothing past the scowl or bittering eye.

Didier: Praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.

I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow, in my solitary, unconnected mind.

The Russians were so weakened by the war of resistance fought by those very afghan villagers, and millions like them, that their monstrous, caligulan empire crumbled around them. It worked, it played out that way, and what it cost was a million afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history — three and a half million refugrees moving through the Kyber pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul. And I, a wanted criminal, working for a mafia crime lord, impersonated an American and looked those people in the eye, and lied to them about the weapons I couldn’t give them.

There’s a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex – a warning sound that frightened potential predators awa from the mouth of the cave when our lower-paleolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of Afghan nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, famers, and guerilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persisten ferocity through the long, cold night that they would’ve frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

They’ed lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but I still loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is a passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of god, or what we call god, and it can never die.

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

Money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big politcal party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.

karla: heroes come in three kinds: Dead, damaged, or dubious.

Karla: Luck is what happens when fate gets tired of waiting

Didier: It is always a fool’s mistake to be alone with someone you shouldn’t've loved.

Didier: The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly and with the eyes open.