Graham Greene

Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced.

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.

Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.