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"He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch."
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"'Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone."

"If I never see you again I will always carry youinsideoutsideon my fingertipsand at brain edgesand in centerscentersof what I am ofwhat remains."

"Nothing's ever gone. We fool ourselves that things fade, but they never do."

"To forget is to blithely toss aside the hard lessons that were hard won by others before us, thereby needlessly dooming us to endure the hard lessons that are likely to be forgotten by those who will follow us. And it is altogether reasonable that in order to avoid this repetitive trouncing, God graciously granted us memories."

"What exactly did you find in Atlanta?Frank unzipped his backpack and started bringing out souvenirs. "Some peach preserves. A couple of T-shirts. A snow globe. And, um, these not-really-Chinese handcuffs.Annabeth forced herself to stay calm. "How about you start from the top-of the story, not the backpack."

"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

"He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us."

"Sometimes I accidentally walk into the places where I and you had spoken before, existed before, which still have the smell ofyour memories, all of a sudden it starts feeling like I have entered a dark room without a door anywhere. Where I can always hear that song I used to love once before."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene

"It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?"

"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."

"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."

"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."

"A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street."
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