01c. 1947 ADHe was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.Graham Greene / quote ↗
02c. 1947 ADDespair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aimGraham Greene / quote ↗
03c. 1947 ADIt's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about itGraham Greene / quote ↗
04c. 1947 ADMy second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.Graham Greene / quote ↗
05c. 1947 ADI have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.Graham Greene / quote ↗
06c. 1947 ADThe great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.Graham Greene / quote ↗
07c. 1947 AD-"-A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge."-"If you knew how little you had to revenge...".Graham Greene / quote ↗
08c. 1947 ADI had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.Graham Greene / quote ↗
09c. 1947 ADOpium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.Graham Greene / quote ↗
10c. 1947 ADChristmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.Graham Greene / quote ↗
11c. 1947 ADA black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.Graham Greene / quote ↗
12c. 1947 ADBut if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. 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 / quote ↗
13c. 1947 ADThe conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.Graham Greene / quote ↗
14c. 1947 ADA writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.Graham Greene / quote ↗
17c. 1947 ADHe had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.Graham Greene / quote ↗
19c. 1947 ADI refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.Graham Greene / quote ↗
20c. 1947 ADThat was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight.Graham Greene / quote ↗
21c. 1947 ADEternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.Graham Greene / quote ↗
22c. 1947 ADExcept for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.Graham Greene / quote ↗
23c. 1947 ADHe wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?Graham Greene / quote ↗
24c. 1947 ADWhat have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?Graham Greene / quote ↗
