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Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love—it's being unhappy together.
Graham Greene
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I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
Graham Greene
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There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
Graham Greene
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[Priest at Hale's cremation] "... our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."
Graham Greene
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That is a genuine duty we owe society, to be a piece of grit in the State machinery.
Of writers
Graham Greene
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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...
Graham Greene
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My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.
Graham Greene
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A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.
Graham Greene
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It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.
Graham Greene
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One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.
Graham Greene
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I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
Graham Greene
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Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Graham Greene
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Graham Greene
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An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.
Graham Greene
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For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.
Graham Greene
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Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.
Graham Greene
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At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.
Graham Greene
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I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.
Graham Greene
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Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?
Graham Greene
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I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.
Graham Greene
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American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.
Graham Greene
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The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Graham Greene
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Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.
Graham Greene
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Graham Greene
Born:
October 2, 1904
Died:
April 3, 1991
(aged 86)
Bio:
Henry Graham Greene was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century.
Known for:
The Quiet American (1955)
The Power and the Glory (1940)
The End of the Affair (1951)
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Brighton Rock (1938)
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