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

Graham Greene

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Graham Greene
Age: 86 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 2
Died: 1991
Died: April 3
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire
Henry Graham Greene
Knew
Animal
Hope
Human
Humans
Reasoning
Mind
Instinct
Never
Despair
Kill

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As the end of the what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.
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That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.
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Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
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People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
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Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.
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Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt
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A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
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Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
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It's a good world if you don't weaken.
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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.
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Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
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A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.
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So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
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In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
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When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
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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.
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One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
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The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
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Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.
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You cannot love without intuition.
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