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4751d5e
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Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
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impossibility
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Graham Greene |
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c3b9c20
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tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, "I never quite understand why English people like teas so."
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Graham Greene |
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8581bf9
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Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness - cleanliness, not purity.
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greeneland
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Graham Greene |
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6abc35e
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I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?
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writing
work
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Graham Greene |
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c3288ad
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Can you explain away love too?' I asked. 'Oh yes,' he said. 'The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won't be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive.
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love
explanation
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Graham Greene |
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41ee5ce
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Time gives poetry to a battlefield...
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Graham Greene |
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5118c19
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There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
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life
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Graham Greene |
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1faed95
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In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
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Graham Greene |
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1e6ce8c
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For a moment I had felt elation as on the instant of waking before one remembers.
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Graham Greene |
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7874d99
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If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
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Graham Greene |
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6a91b37
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The more bare a life is, the more we fear change.
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life
greeneland
mutability
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Graham Greene |
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f5f9f94
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You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
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reality
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Graham Greene |
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96046fe
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You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us ... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr. Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerning the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion.
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Graham Greene |
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a71a6fe
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Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
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Graham Greene |
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010df2d
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No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.
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Graham Greene |
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446531e
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You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.
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Graham Greene |
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97a081e
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Of course,' I said, 'you know her so much better than I ever did.' In some ways,' he said gloomily, and I knew he was thinking of the very ways in which I had known her the best.
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Graham Greene |
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77ccbd6
|
I am late,' she said, 'I know that I am late. So many little things have to be done when you are alone, and I am not yet accustomed to being alone,' she added with a pretty little sob which reminded me of a cut-glass Victorian tear-bottle. She took off thick winter gloves with a wringing gesture which made me think of handkerchiefs wet with grief, and her hands looked suddenly small and useless and vulnerable.
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Graham Greene |
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78b89ae
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I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.
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Graham Greene |
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4610992
|
It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.
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pride
|
Graham Greene |
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3414688
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She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
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fiction
script
existentialism
play
fear-of-death
psychology
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Graham Greene |
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a675ab9
|
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?
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Graham Greene |
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3115186
|
Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act.
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Graham Greene |
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d7ad7c8
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Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
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travel
don-quixote
flying
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Graham Greene |
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650511d
|
The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life.
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Graham Greene |
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f0090cf
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Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
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sex
|
Graham Greene |
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bb5b3c7
|
What I've done is far worse than murder - that's an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it's over and done, but I'm carrying my corruption around with me. It's the coating of my stomach.' He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. 'Never pretend I haven't shown my love.
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Graham Greene |
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d1794e8
|
It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.
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Graham Greene |
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e982d7d
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That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would..
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love
|
Graham Greene |
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17f6581
|
They had the comfort of not learning from experience.
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Graham Greene |
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fca1444
|
What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being?
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sneering
|
Graham Greene |
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85b617a
|
I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of love. Wouldn't he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn't he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even suc..
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Graham Greene |
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f98276e
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I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said. 'You'd prefer worms?' 'Yes, I would.
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Graham Greene |
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0ad71d4
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A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who -- when he has been seriously noted at all -- has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, ..
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Graham Greene |
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b696016
|
I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.
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Graham Greene |
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3f0a2d5
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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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0caff4b
|
You'd taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh.
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Graham Greene |
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d72b6e6
|
There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.
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Graham Greene |
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92565c9
|
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.
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Graham Greene |
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1e4b7c1
|
He put his mouth on her and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth-thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip.
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Graham Greene |
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edc00ab
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Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.
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Graham Greene |
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6ed0c92
|
He had heard men talk of the unfairness of a death-bed repentance - as if it was an easy thing to break the habit of a life whether to do good or evil.
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Graham Greene |
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3d08e3d
|
A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.
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Graham Greene |
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e953fb1
|
how twisted we humans are, and yet they say a god made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any god wo is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as the air.
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Graham Greene |