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The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

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
Plot
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Subjects
Novel
Fiction
Happened
Ends
Remember
Remembers

More quotes by 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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Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Graham Greene
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They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.
Graham Greene
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You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.
Graham Greene
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Hate is a lack of imagination.
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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The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.
Graham Greene
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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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Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Graham Greene
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They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.
Graham Greene
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I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
Graham Greene
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There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Graham Greene
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I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.
Graham Greene
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Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
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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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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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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It's a good world if you don't weaken.
Graham Greene
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The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
Graham Greene
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Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
Graham Greene