HAIL SHANTARAM!!!!!!!!!

Hi ,

The following lines are not my work; these are just a few lines that I found to really good while I was reading SHANTARAM . Some of them are funny while some are really deep. The novel is simply awesome; I think everyone should give a read at least once. So here goes ………………………



· The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.

· Civilisation is defined by what we forbid , rather than what we permit

· When you judge the power of a person, you must judge their capacities as both a friend and as an enemy.

· Truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

· Now sadly there is all attitude and no style. It is the mark of the age in which we live that the style becomes the attitude, instead of the attitude becoming the style.(the context here was attitude and style of gangsters in their work)

· Optimism is the first cousin of love and it is exactly like love in three ways , its pushy, it has no real sense of humour an it turns up where you least expect it.

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

· One of the reasons why we crave for love and seek it so desperately is that love is the only cure for loneliness and shame and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about you are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

· When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.

· The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance is that it works so well.

· Justice is not the only way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way by which we try to save them.

· Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

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

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

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

· Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they are not alone and causing pain is how they grieve.

· It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.

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

· It’s a fact of being in love that we pay no attention to whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it’s said.

· Depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.

· Love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested and loyalty. But there is no 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.

· Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable; fixed for every one of us at earth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised 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.

· In the long run, motive matters more with the good deeds than it does with the bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we’ve done that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motive we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.