shantaram

I recently read the novel Shantaram.  I don’t know how to explain it any other way than saying so much of its words resonated deep within me.  I may have liked it so much because it described some places that I have seen, and a culture I’m progressively more and more interested in.  Or, maybe so many of the philosophies discussed are thoughts I’ve been having over the last few years but I’ve been unable to articulate them as eloquently as the author. It’s almost like he wrote about his life just so I would have the words to express my perceptions and beliefs.  Or, it’s even possible, that I just fell in love with the author and his courageous honesty.  He observes everything and notices every person with beautiful detail.  The moral of the story is, I highly recommend the book, but if you never get the chance to read it here are a few of the quotes that really struck me.

p.s. Shantaram means “Man of God’s peace.”

“The soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no color or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one.” 

“There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception.  We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay.  It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart.”

 “Ask any man with a long enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice.”

“The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus fold s of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.”

“[true] justice is not only the way that we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.”

“The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.”

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.”

“It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species wouldn’t annihilate itself in endless retribution. 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 htat 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.”

“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.  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.”

“Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him.  That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.”

“Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone and causing pain is how they grieve.”

“The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we’re violated, is shame at being human.”

“We are never perfectly objective about anything, that is true, but we can be less objective, or we can be more objective.  And when we define good and evil on the basis of what we know—to be the best of our knowledge at a present time—we are being as objective as possible within the imperfect limits of our understanding.”

“At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. So the priests of one nation bless their soldiers as they march to war, and the imams of another country bless their soldiers as they march out to meet them. And everybody who is involved in the killing says that he has God on his side.  There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of others.” 

“Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.”

“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 our reasons for loving them.” 

“Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbeat.  We know that crying is a good and natural thing.  we know that crying isn’t a weakness, but a kind of strength.  Still, the weeping rips us root by untangled root from the earth and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.” 

“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 number them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the 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.”

 “When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom.”

“There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one.  Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word [glory] really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun.”

“The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus thread.  Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag is behind us as we struggle to go on.  But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance.”

“Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow.”

“Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.”

“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 a 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.”