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f91c2dc
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They don't believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested." "They don't want communism." "They want enough rice," I said. "They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want." "If Indochina goes--" "I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go..
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Graham Greene |
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aff433a
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Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive...He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders. And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or w..
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Graham Greene |
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8dae2d4
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You should dream more. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
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Graham Greene |
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7494111
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You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.
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theif
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Graham Greene |
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c3d5744
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It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
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Graham Greene |
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a1a0a03
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Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
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Graham Greene |
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942800c
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To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.
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Graham Greene |
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029799a
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It isn't. when you come to think of it a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything -- so they believe and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.
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Graham Greene |
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e042137
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He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint.
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Graham Greene |
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ae4d949
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God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don't need admiration, they don't need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can't invent a belief.
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Graham Greene |
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c4fcb34
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There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.
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Graham Greene |
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b14f2fa
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cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any monoprix store. it's built into all poor-quality goods.
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Graham Greene |
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2d36cb7
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His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.
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unfaithfulness
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Graham Greene |
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faa6bad
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O God, forgive me - I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs - protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them - not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things.
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Graham Greene |
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377590a
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Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.
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sex
theology
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Graham Greene |
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41127b8
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Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don't write that as a sneer; there are so many of us who can't)
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Graham Greene |
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57c6474
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She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.
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Graham Greene |
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c297220
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and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.
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Graham Greene |
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3edbd65
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Man made God in his own image, so it's natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man's made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It's his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.
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Graham Greene |
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f0b0fed
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But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
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love
end-of-love
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Graham Greene |
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7c951b1
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It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another?
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Graham Greene |
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7369a0b
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It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield.
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Graham Greene |
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1c479cd
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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 . . .
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Graham Greene |
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82f05ac
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The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, wh..
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Graham Greene |
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8a75157
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Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.
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Graham Greene |
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a62f620
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The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter.
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Graham Greene |
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aa25cb3
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People who like quotations love meaningless generalisations.
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Graham Greene |
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dec775b
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A romantic is usually afraid in case reality doesn't come up to expectations.
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Graham Greene |
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f22cd7c
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Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.
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Graham Greene |
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4243856
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Be Disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living...and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent--and never let either of the two sides know your real name.
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Graham Greene |
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24385be
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We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.
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Graham Greene |
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2d950f3
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Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
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Graham Greene |
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a61b6ef
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I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.
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Graham Greene |
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0db2da8
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Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
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Graham Greene |
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aa1537e
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Who could blame her for seeking my scars in return? When we are unhappy we hurt.
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Graham Greene |
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a6ad325
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It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
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nightmares
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Graham Greene |
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5575173
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So one always starts a journey in a strange land -- taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all.
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Graham Greene |
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ef2a2da
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What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?
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Graham Greene |
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46de44d
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He was feeling happy. It was one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (The Power and the Glory)
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Graham Greene |
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130c6ec
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St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.
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Graham Greene |
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319bd99
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Do you like dogs?' 'No.' 'I thought the British were great dog-lovers.' 'We think Americans love dollars, but there must be exceptions.
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Graham Greene |
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0f44ece
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Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.
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Graham Greene |
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1a164d8
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Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
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drinking
love
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Graham Greene |
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8aa0d6b
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If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.
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Graham Greene |