Graham Greene - Brighton Rock (1938)

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[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

Graham Greene
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.

Graham Greene
At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

Graham Greene
[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin.

Graham Greene
[Priest at Hale's cremation] "... our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."

Graham Greene
You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Graham Greene
[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality.... He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:... when all the time it was a country the stranger knew...

Graham Greene
He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.

Graham Greene
... he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.

Graham Greene
[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy.

Graham Greene
[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'.

Graham Greene
Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises...

Graham Greene
I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods—Good and Evil.

Graham Greene
[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.

Graham Greene
"People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time."

Graham Greene
... the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks.

Graham Greene
People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

Graham Greene