Orient Express

You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.

She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to.

When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.

She was proud of her power of prophecy, though she had not yet lived to see any of her prophecies fulfilled.

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.

‎His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.

You are lovely, brilliant, witty...the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give.

But this turns out to be a useful if not fortunate failure, because it enables us to read the book without having to do so through the prism of any later celluloid distortion.

The ‘entertainment’ of Stamboul Train – as I shall call it from now on – was designed and ready-made for motion pictures but nonetheless counts as Greene’s worst filmic flop. Indeed, as he himself so wryly put it, continuing the quoted sentence above: The devil looks after his own and in [Stamboul Train] I succeeded in both aims, though the film rights seemed at the time an unlikely dream, for before I had completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film, Turksib. The film manufactured from my book by Twentieth Century-Fox came last and was far and away the worst, though not so bad as a later television production by the BBC.

A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement. The station lamps sailed by them into darkness,

... in a flash of insight he became aware of the innumerable necessary evils of which life for her was made up.