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"There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief."
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"Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life."

"It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning."

"I don't spot junk neighbourhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowsers wand: 'Junk here!"

"A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait."

"It's probably weird to think about an addiction like it's a sentient being, but that's how it feels. Like it's something living inside you. Something you can't get rid of because killing it means killing you. I can't really understand addictions to drugs or alcohol. Things that control you. But an eating disorder is an addiction you control. Wait, is that paradoxical? I prefer to believe not."

"I used to love youI still doSo SelfishI love the old youThe you that didnt shoot drugs...The you that didnt get beat on by menYou laugh in my face and call me a foolBut its trueI still love youSometimes,I can see the old youWhen your eyes flashWhen you almost look alive."

"I have a very addictive personality. If it isn't women, it's money. If it isn't money, it's speeding. And if it isn't speeding, it's women. I also like expensive video consoles where I can punch, kick, screw, shoot and drive legally all night anywhere I fucking well want to."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching."

"It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."

"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."

"I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing."

"If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it."

"You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."
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