The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

I don’t believe all that they write in these books. We are all human.’

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.

women were appallingly practical: they built new plans at once out of the ruins of the old.

His conscience began automatically to work: it was like a slot machine into which any coin could be fitted, even a cheater’s blank disk.

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.

You only had to turn up the underside of any situation and out came scuttling these small absurd contradictory situations.

Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill.

instinct is like a sense of duty—one can confuse it with loyalty very easily.

He had been walking all day and he was very tired; he found a dry spot and sat down. When the lightning struck he could see the clearing. All around was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company—his aloneness was like a threat of things to come.

Fear and death were not the worst things. It was sometimes a mistake for life to go on.

He thought, how quiet it is, how safe. He remembered townspeople who couldn’t sleep in country places because of the silence: silence can be like noise, dinning against the eardrums.

‘I never believed you would return.’ ‘Oh well, lieutenant, you know how it is. Even a coward has a sense of duty.’

‘We have to die some time,’ the lieutenant said. ‘It doesn’t seem to matter so much when.’