Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

"She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers"

"Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures."

"A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced"

"She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world."

"You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God."

"But you do believe, don’t you," Rose implored him, "you think it’s true" "Of course it’s true," the Boy said. "What else could there be" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments." "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe."

"I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'Rose didn't answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil."

"You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."