“Hope is an instinct only the reasoning mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.”
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
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“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, The Power and the Glory
“Curious pedantries moved him.”
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
“Captain Fellows was touched with fear; he was aware of an inordinate love which robbed him of authority. 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, The Power and the Glory
Much as I love Bob Dylan, this is the absolute nadir of his career. This is the part in a biopic where the drugged-out perform disgraces himself in public. It starts out funny, but after he does that weird choking thing at 1:55, it’s just sad. They play the song for like six fucking minutes, and by the end, Keith Richards still doesn’t know what the chords are.
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‘Well, let’s take a taxi to Brenda’s.’
But halfway there Jock said, ‘Don’t let’s go there. Let’s go some other place. Let’s go to some low joint.’
‘All the same to me. Tell him to go to some low joint.’
‘Go to some low joint,’ said Jock, putting his head through the window.
The cab wheeled round and made towards Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘We can always ring Brenda from the low joint.’
”— Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
“A literary generation whose critical organ is called The Believer—with its implication that perfect faith should be taken at face value, unskeptically—and that expects every writer to be a literacy tutor, as if goodness is part of aesthetic achievement, has perhaps forgotten that literature is a calling in part because it is a daimon.”
