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121 " I didn’t bother to ask him why he didn’t wait for someone from the American Legation, for I knew the reason. French methods are a little old-fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the conscience, the sense of guilt, a criminal should be confronted with his crime, for he may break down and betray himself. I told myself again I was innocent, "
― Graham Greene , The Quiet American
122 " It wouldn’t have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths, "
123 " It’s always the same wherever one goes—it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations. "
124 " Aren't we all better dead? the opium reasoned within me. "
125 " The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing—perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves. We were all expendable. "
126 " Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays. "
127 " He’s a superior sort of journalist—they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea. "
128 " I didn't mean that,' Pyle said. 'When you are in love you want to play the game, that's all.' That's true, I thought, but not as he innocently means it. To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered. "
129 " God save us always,’ I said, ‘from the innocent and the good. "
130 " All right. I know I’m behaving badly, and I’m going to go on behaving badly. This is a situation where people do behave badly. "
131 " Ordinary life goes on—that has saved many a man’s reason. "
132 " So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought. "
133 " Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride "
134 " Silence like a plant put out tendrils: it seemed to grow under the door and spread its leaves in the room where I stood. "
135 " Sooner or later,’ Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, ‘one has to take sides. If one is to remain human. "
136 " Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding. "
137 " Ordinary life goes on - that has saved many a man's reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, or chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together the personal fear. "
138 " In the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled and truth is love. "
139 " don’t worry. I’m not shocked. I have no politics. "
140 " The job of a reporter is to expose and record. "