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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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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
Tasks
Elicit
Outside
Storytellers
Understanding
Storyteller
State
Approval
Lying
Sympathy
States
Boundaries
Task
Measure

More quotes by Graham Greene

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Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
Graham Greene
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American bankers believe in the personal touch the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.
Graham Greene
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It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Graham Greene
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Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
Graham Greene
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The problem of pretending to be alive.
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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It's a good world if you don't weaken.
Graham Greene
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I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy. You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time. That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all. You'd make my bed for me? Perhaps.
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.
Graham Greene
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Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
Graham Greene
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Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
Graham Greene
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If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.
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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Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.
Graham Greene
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They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
Graham Greene
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God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
Graham Greene
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A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.
Graham Greene