She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

Graham Greene

Categorized in : Memories Dying Individuality

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

Graham Greene

superiority solitary laughing

Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.

Graham Greene

wall gun believe

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

Graham Greene

innocent said

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

Graham Greene

tasks understanding lying

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

Graham Greene

artist success thinking

God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.

Graham Greene

hate heart running

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

Graham Greene

crowded vacancy

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?

Graham Greene

hate men years

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

Graham Greene

literature giving men

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

Graham Greene

our-love bleeding eye

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

Graham Greene

unhappiness discipline long

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

rocks people looks

Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.

Graham Greene

proud pride looks

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

Graham Greene

being-wise wise young

love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.

Graham Greene

love-affair affair ends

Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

Graham Greene

ducks cooking art

They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.

Graham Greene

marijuana mother thinking

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

Graham Greene

kissing pain love-you

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

Graham Greene

movie actors book

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Graham Greene

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