Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory (1940)

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What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days—and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.

Graham Greene
Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

Graham Greene
It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Graham Greene
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Graham Greene
Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

Graham Greene
When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.

Graham Greene
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.

Graham Greene
When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity.... Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Graham Greene
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory—or for ever.

Graham Greene
Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too, but it doesn't talk about love.

Graham Greene
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

Graham Greene
You cannot control what you love—you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

Graham Greene
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
It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

Graham Greene
The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

Graham Greene
The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

Graham Greene