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The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

“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.”

“How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”

“And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.”

“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.”

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”

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

“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.”

“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 . . .”

“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.”

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Book Keywords:

glory, corruption, death, vice, beauty, evil, angels, hope, hatred, hate, acceptance, god, christ, sin, sacrifice, love, animals, male-beauty, imagination, despair

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