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fa7b1e3
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He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared.
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Graham Greene |
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5b91650
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I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations... I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
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Graham Greene |
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06d0f11
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They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
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Graham Greene |
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a330374
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You are lovely, brilliant, witty...the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give.
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Graham Greene |
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e823b79
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She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers
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spirituality
paranormal-activity
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Graham Greene |
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b3b34b3
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But she wouldn't pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasn't that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all one's belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasn't loading the dice.
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magic
prayer
comfort
religion
planning
secularism
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Graham Greene |
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483f508
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You kill a man - that is so easy,' Dr Hasselbacher said, 'it needs no skill. You can be certain of what you've done, you can judge death, but to save a man - that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.
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Graham Greene |
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b0a43ed
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The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
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lies
philosophy
truth
mathematics
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Graham Greene |
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35f8f29
|
Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.' He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day. I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save ..
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time
travel
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Graham Greene |
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5222ef4
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You talk too easily,' the Boy said. 'Talk?' Mr Prewitt said. 'I could shake the world. Let them put me in the dock if they like. I'll give them--revelation. I've sunk so deep I carry--' he was shaken by an enormous windy self-esteem--he hiccupped twice--'the secrets of the sewer.
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Graham Greene |
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49679d8
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I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
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selfisness
self
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Graham Greene |
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3eccf9c
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There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no prose at all. He knew.
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Graham Greene |
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9bac2a1
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Quizas haya un profeta tambien junto al juez en esos tribunales donde se toman nuestras verdaderas decisiones.
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Graham Greene |
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b570a92
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Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did.
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humour
humor
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Graham Greene |
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1ca3616
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It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck: by day he tried to win a few moments of its company, crouched under the rusting handcuffs in the locked office, reading the reports from the sub-stations..
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Graham Greene |
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fa6cfc2
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I think the reason lay partly in his idea of immortality, but I think too it belonged to his war against the Inland Revenue. He was a great believer in delaying tactics. "Never answer all their questions," he would say. "Make them write again. And be ambiguous. You can always decide what you mean later according to circumstances. The bigger the file the bigger the work. Personnel frequently change. A newcomer has to start looking at the fil..
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Graham Greene |
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4550544
|
to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...
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houses
streets
memory
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Graham Greene |
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43dc58a
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I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.
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Graham Greene |
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885d77a
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I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.
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Graham Greene |
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f6ba476
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It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin--only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.
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Graham Greene |
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2113833
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In the vision there is no morality
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Graham Greene |
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f69d9c3
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They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice: they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.
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Graham Greene |
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a3c8728
|
What will we care for the why and the wherefore?
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Graham Greene |
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8af7854
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They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.
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war
nation-building
innocence
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Graham Greene |
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e6765b0
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He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.
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Graham Greene |
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787746b
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I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud I say to myself silently and write it here. What can one build in the desert? Sometimes after a day when we have made love many times, I wonder whether it isn't possible to come to an end of sex, and I know that he is wondering too and is afraid of that point where the desert begins. Wha..
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love
love-ending
|
Graham Greene |
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84527a1
|
And sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to, I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.
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Graham Greene |
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e9d20d5
|
We didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply, and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.
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death-and-dying
|
Graham Greene |
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d5f49b5
|
There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when on finds it.
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Graham Greene |
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641ef7d
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I could have hated him for saying it: it was like a claim. If you really loved me, I thought, you'd behave like any other injured husband. You'd get angry and your anger would set me free.
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Graham Greene |
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cf8f17e
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The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a spri..
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Graham Greene |
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5ce3ca0
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The old women gossiped as they always had done, squatting on the floor outside the urinoir, carrying Fate in the lines of their faces as others on the palm.
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Graham Greene |
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51f84a8
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They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
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Graham Greene |
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27c927d
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Perhaps we were looking strained in our manner, because I noticed we had attracted the attention of a little man who sat on a sofa not far off. I tried to outstare him and that was easy. He had a long moustache and fawn-like eyes and he looked hurriedly away: his elbow caught his glass of beer and spun it on to the floor, so that he was overcome with confusion. I was sorry then because it occurred to me that he might have recognized me from..
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the-end-of-the-affair
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Graham Greene |
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87e352f
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These are touchy times. National sensitivities are on permanent alert and it's getting harder by the moment to say boo to a goose, lest the goose in question belong to the paranoid majority (goosism under threat), the thin-skinned minority (victims of goosophobia), the militant fringe (Goose Sena), the separatists (Goosistan Liberation Front), the increasingly well organised cohorts of society's historical outcasts (the ungoosables, or Sche..
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Graham Greene |
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83d9ca3
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eikha xekhasei edo kai polu kairo na dinomai kai n' aneko s' otidepote, se tetoio bathmo pou tha mporouse na pei kaneis pos eikha khasei kata kapoion tropo ten ikanoteta na endiapheromai.
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Graham Greene |
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a0d860b
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There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.
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Graham Greene |
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289bf3b
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There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself.
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Graham Greene |
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da04ccf
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For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you - with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell - can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap.
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lies
god
saints
lust
sin
|
Graham Greene |
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de2cc12
|
There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when one finds it.
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Graham Greene |
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7562945
|
How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.
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Graham Greene |
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61f8dea
|
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.
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preparation
virgin
|
Graham Greene |
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2013742
|
I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.
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Graham Greene |
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bcae357
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What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.
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Graham Greene |