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2b9f445
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You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.
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Graham Greene |
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f806e3a
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We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
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Graham Greene |
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92b444e
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Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
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pragmatism
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Graham Greene |
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68c180a
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The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
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Graham Greene |
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f75f5bc
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My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
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Graham Greene |
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0edcc57
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We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.
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Graham Greene |
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adef29a
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How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.
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sacrifice
death
god
glory
corruption
vice
evil
sin
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Graham Greene |
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f9abf6b
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As long as one suffers one lives.
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suffering
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Graham Greene |
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212a195
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From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.
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Graham Greene |
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4f574e4
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The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
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Graham Greene |
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55bebbf
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Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
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hope
despair
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Graham Greene |
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1ec3a1b
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So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done..
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writing
daily-life
preoccupations
superficiality
subconscious
creative-process
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Graham Greene |
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49f4ea1
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One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
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Graham Greene |
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9e03f70
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If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
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Graham Greene |
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278ad21
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There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
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Graham Greene |
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040e7b2
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How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.
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Graham Greene |
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045c518
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There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
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drinking
relationships
liquor
relief
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Graham Greene |
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b69cdec
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A man kept his character even when he was insane.
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Graham Greene |
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66ba9c1
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You cannot love without intuition.
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Graham Greene |
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385131b
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I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.
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Graham Greene |
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9f31fd2
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Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
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marriage
love
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Graham Greene |
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52e8006
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I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.
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Graham Greene |
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ca9b086
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Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too, but it doesn't talk about love.
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Graham Greene |
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2189266
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What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
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Graham Greene |
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abbe366
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He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
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Graham Greene |
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af9246a
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I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.
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Graham Greene |
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1fef315
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But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .
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beauty
male-beauty
sin
|
Graham Greene |
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404183e
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He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
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graham-greene
narcissism
soul
|
Graham Greene |
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1e42555
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We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.
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Graham Greene |
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f5fd6a5
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He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.
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unhappiness
life
|
Graham Greene |
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7b2eb36
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God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
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Graham Greene |
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207905e
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In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.
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Graham Greene |
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bcf279c
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Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
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Graham Greene |
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86e1584
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Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.
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love
sierra-leone
pity
|
Graham Greene |
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01b3a26
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A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced
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mind
human
concieve
capable
experience
thoughtful
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Graham Greene |
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96b2656
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I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
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Graham Greene |
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ecf4137
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It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
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Graham Greene |
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6b2ed3e
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I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman's voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you're looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that's the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange f..
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Graham Greene |
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9373274
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love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end."
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Graham Greene |
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2c86a35
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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
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future
childhood
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Graham Greene |
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5a116bf
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Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.
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Graham Greene |
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82f2060
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I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.
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Graham Greene |
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c8ddfba
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I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.
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Graham Greene |
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8a07a6b
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Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
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Graham Greene |