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47a4a6e
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In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff.
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Graham Greene |
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93fd472
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Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.
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Graham Greene |
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66a5222
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Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. 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 daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could..
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Graham Greene |
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3c5928f
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Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the ..
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Graham Greene |
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ca6c65e
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The Lord is my shepherd." But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher."
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shepherd
religion-christianity
sheep
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Graham Greene |
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e3b66a3
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That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
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Graham Greene |
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f892f28
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Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.
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Graham Greene |
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721c451
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It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.
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end-of-the-party
graham-greene
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Graham Greene |
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b5c6942
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I think I have always liked my fellow men. Liking is a great deal safer than love. It doesn't demand victims. Who is your victim, Querry?
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Graham Greene |
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3e8a2ff
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and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.
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memory
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Graham Greene |
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28451ce
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Nothing in life was as ugly as death.
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life
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Graham Greene |
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e3cb69a
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I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate,...
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Graham Greene |
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7a48e9e
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The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs.
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Graham Greene |
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bc5d101
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Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother's Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody.
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Graham Greene |
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dd1a84f
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I thought to myself: 'Is the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so.
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Graham Greene |
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b419cf1
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The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.
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reading
imagination
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Graham Greene |
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05b9e13
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I don't think Communism will work--in the long run--any better than Christianity has done, and I'm not the Crusader type. Capitalism or Communism? Perhaps God is a Capitalist. I want to be on the side most likely to win during my lifetime. Don't look shocked, John. You think I'm a cynic, but I just don't want to waste a lot of time. The side that wins will be able to build the better hospitals, and give more to cancer research--when all thi..
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Graham Greene |
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831b1be
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She was proud of her power of prophecy, though she had not yet lived to see any of her prophecies fulfilled.
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Graham Greene |
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fb6fd59
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He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape.
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Graham Greene |
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61b8e42
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Don't you believe it. I'll tell you what life is. It's gaol, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It's dying slowly.
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Graham Greene |
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49de195
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You try to draw everything into the net of your faith, father, but you can't steal all the virtues. Gentleness isn't Christian, self-sacrifice isn't Christian, charity isn't, remorse isn't. I expect the cavemen wept to see another's tears.
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Graham Greene |
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844fe9e
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O thanatos einai panta apo monos tou mia apodeixe eilikrineias.
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philosophical
truth
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Graham Greene |
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fb1d3fa
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My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do no..
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Graham Greene |
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632cbc9
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It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations
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Graham Greene |
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f46b6c5
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Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn't believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right balance, just as Christ had, the legendary figure whom he would have liked to believe in. 'Come unto me all ye that travail are and heavy laden.' Young as the girl was at that August picnic she was heavily laden with ..
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Graham Greene |
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8f33b0d
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I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.
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love
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Graham Greene |
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9ea6229
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I'm afraid of the dark.' And his mother: 'Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid in the dark.' But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it.
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fear
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Graham Greene |
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d237c3b
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Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.
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life
vignettes
goodbyes
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Graham Greene |
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b5f5cfd
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I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
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love
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Graham Greene |
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7f412b0
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Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
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pain
jokes
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Graham Greene |
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14f6ac4
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When you feel unable to change your bar you have become old.
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Graham Greene |
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6591e78
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We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It's as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other's misery. But I don't even know the design.
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Graham Greene |
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9378a5f
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Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . .
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Graham Greene |
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fdb9791
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But you do believe, don't you," Rose implored him, "you think it's true?" "Of course it's true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it's the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don't know nothing. Of course there's Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments."..
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fiction
religion
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Graham Greene |
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b9c1c1b
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Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.
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Graham Greene |
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c4d581a
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Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now--not desire, but only the reminder of it?
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Graham Greene |
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eabebcd
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Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet."
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Graham Greene |
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0f090db
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I said what do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the T.U.C. and British Railways and the Co-op?
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house-of-commons
tuc
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Graham Greene |
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f4394c7
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Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked. T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.' 'What are you going to do? Share them?' 'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted ..
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money
love
things
objects
materialism
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Graham Greene |
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4858aac
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You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.' 2
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Graham Greene |
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ec1d98c
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Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on toward the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.
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Graham Greene |
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1491c04
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The Minister had a great respect for Pyle - Pyle had taken a good degree in - well, one of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatrecraft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books).
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Graham Greene |
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d223e98
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He sat heavily down on a tall tubular adjustable chair, which shortened suddenly under his weight and split him on the floor. Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.
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Graham Greene |
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1ebd2bb
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Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain--where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.
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Graham Greene |