Quote

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

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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
Hate
Major
Redemption
Firsts
Ten
Ruined
First
Seemed
Fifteen
Long
Committed
Carried
Years
Seven
Fewer
Men
Sin
Test
Clutched
Love
Couldn
Tests
Immeasurably
Life
Year
Majors
Deathbed

More quotes by Graham Greene

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Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
Graham Greene
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A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced
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A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.
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Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
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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.
Graham Greene
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I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.
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So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.
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I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
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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.
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They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.
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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
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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.
Graham Greene
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I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.
Graham Greene
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There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
Graham Greene
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Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
Graham Greene
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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
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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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You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.
Graham Greene
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love had turned into love affair with a begining and an end.
Graham Greene
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It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.
Graham Greene