Quotes from The Power and the Glory

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“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, quote from The Power and the Glory

“And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep.... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“He was feeling happy. It was one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (The Power and the Glory)”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“O God, forgive me - I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs - protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them - not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness - cleanliness, not purity.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“You cannot control what you love—you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“They deserved nothing less than the truth--a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

“He had heard men talk of the unfairness of a death-bed repentance - as if it was an easy thing to break the habit of a life whether to do good or evil.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory

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