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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
#Hate #Hands #Forgive Me
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“Hate is a lack of imagination.”
-- Graham Greene
#Hate #Acceptance #Imagination
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“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”
-- Graham Greene
#Love #Inspirational #Spiritual
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“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
-- Graham Greene
#Love #Depression #Fear
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“I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.”
-- Graham Greene
#Love You #Dark #Smell
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“You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
-- Graham Greene
#Mercy
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“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”
-- Graham Greene
#Daring
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“My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.”
-- Graham Greene
#Typewriters #Hands #Two
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“Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”
-- Graham Greene
#Thinking #Night #Luxury
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“I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”
-- Graham Greene
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“Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.”
-- Graham Greene
#Truth #Lying #Wine
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“When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.”
-- Graham Greene
#Mistake #Hate #Believe
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“If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.”
-- Graham Greene
#Hurt #Pain #Philosophy
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“Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?”
-- Graham Greene
#Passion #Jealous #Hatred
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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
#Glasses #Alcohol #Understanding
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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.”
-- Graham Greene
#Men #People #Execution
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“Innocence is a kind of insanity”
-- Graham Greene
#Insanity #Innocence #Kind
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“Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.”
-- Graham Greene
#Revenge #Worry #Charity
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“I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.”
-- Graham Greene
#Tired #Sick
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“Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.”
-- Graham Greene
#Pregnancy #Curiosity #Age
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“We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.”
-- Graham Greene
#Clothes #Mind #Nails
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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
#Happiness #Ignorance #Men
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“Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
-- Graham Greene
#Dumb #Bells #Literature
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“Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.”
-- Graham Greene
#Success #Congratulations #Break
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“Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.”
-- Graham Greene
#Children #Dark #Years
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“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”
-- Graham Greene
#Fake People #Distance #Writing
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“He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.”
-- Graham Greene
#Soul #Narcissism #Satisfied
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“There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.”
-- Graham Greene
#Brother #Father #Jealous
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“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
-- Graham Greene
#Looks #Stories #Moments
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“When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity…”
-- Graham Greene
#Love #Loyalty #Understanding
