For what is love if not the promise to forgive?

What characterizes the human race more,’ Karla once asked me, ‘cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?’ I thought the question was acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know that it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human races. 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.

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

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.

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.

Dead lovers are the toughest rivals.

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

It's such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there's too much of it around. There's to much love in the world. Sometimes I think thats 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.

Silence is the tortured man's revenge

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

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.

Few of the bests!!

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

Truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

I dont know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it

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 Indians are Italians of Asia!!

The Indians are the Italians of Asia.... Every man in both countries is a singer when he is 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 India and the language of Italy, they make every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalite. These are nations where love-amore, pyaar- makes a cavalier of a borsalino on a street corner and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours.

Few more short quotes

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

If you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.

A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.

Wars can't really change things. It's peace that makes the deepest cut.

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

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

Why do we fight!!

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and woman. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on and die and keep on dying year after year is the will to protect the land and the woman.

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Stand-over man

A stand-over man, ..... He beats upon men he knows can't fight back, and takes whatever he wants from them. In my country, we call these guys stand-over men because they really do stand over little guys and steal from them.

Wisdom vs cleverness!!

I think wisdom is very over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness with all the guts kicked out of it. I'd rather be clever than wise, any day. Most of the wise people give me a headache, but I never met a clever man or woman I didn't like.

Whose side are you on ?

There is no man and no place, without war..... The only thing we can do is choose a side and fight. That is the only choice we get- who we fight for, who we fight against. That's life

Every heartbeat is a universe of possibilities!!

Every heartbeat is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he's meant. He had been trying to tell me that every human has the power to transform his fate. I'd always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for everyone of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the 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 how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

Honour is not in what we do rather how we do it!!

Lettie(one character from the novel) had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers and mafiosi as men of honour, The confusion, I think was hers, not mine. She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way- the Geneva convention exists for that very reason- and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble.

Are your reasons right?

Sometimes it's necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong- that we don't lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we we do is right.


If we envy someone for all the right reasons, we are halfway to wisdom.

Motive matters more with the good deeds than it does with the bad..... Redemption's climb is steepest if the good that we did is soiled with secret shame.

Best one liners from the book

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

The end when it comes, is always too soon.

Heroes only come in 3 kinds: dead, damaged or dubious.

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

Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.

The real trick in life id to want nothing and to succeed in getting it.

There is no such thing as forever, I don't know why we use the word.