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Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Gregory David Roberts

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Gregory David Roberts
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 21
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Forbid
Permit
Defined
Civilization

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None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough.
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I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.
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I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.
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Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.
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People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much.
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But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.
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Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.
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Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.
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What is it? she asked. I'm looking for your wings. You are my guardian angel, aren't you? I'm afraid not, she replied, her cheeks dimplingwith a wry smile. There's too much of the devil in me for that. Just how much devil, I grinned, are we talking about here?
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Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.
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Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child
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when you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy.
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The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.
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There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.
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More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.
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Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.
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Food is music to the body, music is food to the heart.
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Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.
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Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.
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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.\
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