And we live on...

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 truth another than our own . With longing the pure, ineffable yearnings to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.

God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

Every second every atom...

Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that's greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or the flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye , have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can't detect them. Some things like, triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you've just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery nd they change your life forever.

The Ocean Inside us (Part 4)

The tendency towards complexity has carried the universe from almost perfect simplicity to the kind of complexity that we see around us, everywhere we look. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny precious wisdom they give to us, even those dreaded and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There's nowhere else in the world where that's quite so true. I didn't know that then, as I closed my eyes in the dark and breathing silence on that first night in Bombay. I was running on instinct, and pushing my luck. I didn't know that I'd already given my heart of the woman, and the city. And knowing none of it, I fell, before the smile faded from my lips, into a dreamless, gentle sleep. 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.

One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow.

It is stubborness that permits one to become a mathematician.

There are many animals that can express 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.

Love cannot be tested.Honesty can be tested, and loyality. But there is no test for love, it goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because it is born in the part of us that doesnot die.

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

Every virtous act is inspired by a dark secret.
In the long run, motive matters mre with good deeds than it does with bad . When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've donehave run their course, It's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secret we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption's climb is the steepest if the god we did is soiled with secret shame.

If we envy someone for all the right reasons ,we're half way to wisdom.

If glory is amagnificent and raptured exaltation.It was what love would be like, if love was a sin.It what music would be, if music could kill you.

The Ocean Inside us (Part 3)

And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious,if glory is a magnificent and ruptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love were a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.

Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny precious wisdom they give to us, even those dreaded and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.

It's such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there's too much of it around. There's too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is - a place where everybody's happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.

We know who we are and define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.

You can never tell what people have inside them, until you start taking it away

A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.

Silence is the tortured mans revenge.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.

Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around.

News is about what people do. Gossip is about how they enjoyed doing it.

Nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.

There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.

Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp; and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

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 instead is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone.

The Indians are the Italians of Asia

The indians are the Italians of Asia. It can be said certainly with equal justice, that the Italians are the Indians of Europe.

I think there is so much Italian in th Indian and so much Indian in the Italians...

they demand a goddess even if the religion doesnot provide one.

Every man in both countries is a singer when he's happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner.

For them food is music inside the body and music is food inside the heart..

The language of Indian and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banality.

These are the nations where love makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl.

The Ocean Inside us (Part 2)

And the thoughts still flow...

..and sometimes my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

In this way justice is done...because justice is a judgment that is both fair and forgiving...justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.
I pushed through alone to the slap and sting of sunlight outside the airport, intoxicated with the exhilaration of escape: another wall scaled, another border crossed, another day and night to run and hide
My heart thumped under the command of the new climate. Each breath was an angry little victory... the choking humidity makes amphibians of us all.

I tried to fix my eyes on the clear and perfect stars of that fated night's black heaven, but again and again my concentration lapsed, and I found myself staring at the dark edge of the plateau. And I knew, in the way we know without a word that love is lost or in the sudden, sure way we know that a friend is false...

If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth...It was impossible to tell from that photo how much those men had loved to laugh, and how readily they'd smiled...only my own eyes stared back at me as I held the picture in my bandaged hands, and remembered the names of the men leaning together in the ragged lines."

Truth is a bully that we all pretend to like.

I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.

Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things.

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.

One of the ironies of courage and why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

The tendency towards complexity has carried the universe from almost perfect simplicity to the kind of complexity that we see around us, everywhere we look.
The universe is always doing this. It is always moving from the simple to the complex.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy things.

The only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all.

Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul.
Floating on the dead sea of the drug stone, there's no sense of pain, no regret or shame, no feelings of guilt or grief, no depression and no desire. The sleeping universe enters and envelops every atom of existence. Insensible stillness and peace disperse fear and suffering. Thoughts drift like ocean weeds and vanish into distant, grey somnolence, unperceived and indeterminable. The body succumbs to cryogenic slumber: the listless heart beats faintly, and breathing slowly fades to random whispers. Thick nirvanic numbness clogs the limbs, and downward, deeper, the sleeper slides and glides towards oblivion, the perfect and eternal stone.

The Ocean Inside us (Part 1)

This is an archive of quotes from one of my favorite books,truly a masterpiece - 'Shantaram'
There are definitely going to be more parts to this post as the book is like an ocean of experiences and an amassment of beautiful thoughts,hence it is unfeasible to have it all in one post...after all it took the man 13yrs to write it...

We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate.

I always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth,
and as constant as the circuit of stars.
But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that.
The truth is that no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter now good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

There's no believing in God...We either know God, or we don't.

The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men, It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and there are bad deeds. Men are just men--it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good or evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone--the noblest of man alive or the most wicked--has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds 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.

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 be in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.

Astounding and puzzling images from the city tumbled and turned in my mind like leaves on a wave of wind, and my blood so thrilled with hope and possibility that I couldn't suppress a smile, lying there in the dark...In that moment, in those shadows, I was almost safe.

The past reflects eternally between two mirrors –
the bright mirror of words and deeds,
and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.

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 perception.
We're helpless in the face of it and the cost of knowing love is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay.

A swiss knife..huh !

a swiss knife,
HISTORY tells why we need it...
The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Pretty impressive.
Also pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with?
Not much of a weapon there.
Corkscrews, Bottle openers. 'Come on, buddy, let's go. You get past me, the guy in back of me, he's got a spoon.
Back off. I've got the toe clippers right here....