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The Confidential Agent QUOTES

The Confidential Agent QUOTES

1 " The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam's apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

2 " D. felt a little envious of him as he stood there in the yard among the cars — he looked established. Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same a time haunted — by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

3 " The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices—for whose death? "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

4 " face a little smudged with tears. She asked, ‘Was it "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

5 " How much treachery is always nourished in little overworked centres of somebody else’s idealism "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

6 " An east wind blew from the City: it had the stone-cold of big business blocks and banks. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

7 " Drop that gun, you fool. This is London. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

8 " The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

9 " خشونت پدیده ای است بیش از حد ابتدایی، نغض کننده ذوق آدمی است "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

10 " همواره عجیب به نظر می آید که آدم شرح حال کسی را که بدو عشق می ورزد از کس دیگری بشنود، مثل آن است که آدم در یک میز آشنا به کشویی مخفی و پر از اسناد افشاگرانه بربخورد "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

11 " You’ve got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

12 " She had said, ‘We’re unlucky. We don’t believe in God. So it’s no use praying. If we did I could say beads, burn candles—oh, a hundred things. As it is, I can only keep my fingers crossed. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

13 " آدم باید به مرده ها حسادت کند، آدم های زنده از تنهایی و بی اعتمادی رنج می برند "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent

14 " You've got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all. You probably end with a gas oven. I've chosen certain people who've had the lean portion for some centuries now."

"But your people are betrayed all the time."

"It doesn't matter. You might say it's the only job left for anyone--sticking to a job. It's no good taking a moral line--my people commit atrocities like the others. I suppose if I believed in a God it would be simpler."

"Do you believe," she said, "that your leaders are any better than L.'s?" She swallowed her brandy and began to tap the counter nervously with the little metal bullet.

"No. Of course not. But I still prefer the people they lead--even if they lead them all wrong."

"The poor, right or wrong," she scoffed.

"It's no worse, is it, than my country right or wrong? You choose your side once for all--of course it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that. "

― Graham Greene , The Confidential Agent