Yet Another Graham Greene Quote of the Day

This man just hits it out of the park. (O.K. all you English Lit people, don’t roll your eyes. I’ve never read Greene before in my life. I went to a school system that had us read classics like One Fat Summer. ‘Nuf said.)

Yesterday I bought a crucifix, a cheap, ugly one because I had to do it quickly. I blushed when I asked for it. Somebody might have seen me in the shop. They ought to have opaque glass in their doors like rubber-goods shops. When I lock the door of my room, I can take it out from the bottom of my jewel-case. I wish I knew a prayer that wasn’t me, me, me. Help me. Let me be happier. Let me die soon. Me, me, me.

[...] Dear God, I’ve tried to love and I’ve made such a hash of it. If I could love you, I’d know how to love them. I believe the legend. I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God. Teach me to love. I don’t mind my pain. It’s their pain I can’t stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.

The End of the Affair

Another Graham Greene Quote of the Day

She had said to me – they were nearly the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the hall from her assignation – ‘You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other…” She had already made her decision, though I didn’t know it till next day, when the telephone presented nothing but the silent open mouth of somebody found dead. She said, ‘My dear, my dear. People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’

‘That’s not our kind of love.’

‘I sometimes don’t believe there’s any other kind.’

The End of the Affair

Your Graham Greene Quote of the Day

Something to ponder during Lent:

G. Greene

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself [...] into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

The End of the Affair