Miscellaneous Quotations G-H
"'Nation here! nation theere! I'm a man and yo're another, but nation's
nowhere.'"
Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia's Lovers (Harmondsworth, 1996, p.42).
"'I want to deal with the essentially unheroic,
with the day-to-day life of that vast majority of people who are at the
mercy of paltry circumstance. Dickens understood the possibility of such
work, but his tendency to melodrama on the one hand, and his humour on
the other, prevented him from thinking of it.'"
George Gissing, New Grub Street (Oxford 1993, p.144).
"'Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing
a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter.'"
George Gissing, New Grub Street
(Oxford 1993, p.145).
"Heartbreak is a very old-fashioned disorder,
associated with poverty of brain."
George Gissing, The Odd Women (London 1993, p.148).
"Self-complacency and self-satisfaction may
perhaps be numbered among the principal sources of contentment. It is necessary
for him who would endure existence with patience, that he should conceive
himself to be something, - that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher
in the muster-roll of man."
William Godwin, St. Leon (Oxford 1994, p.39).
"Friendship is an object of a peculiar sort;
the smallest reserve is deadly to it. I may indeed feel the emotions of
a friend towards a man who in part conceals from me the thoughts of his
heart; but then I must be unconscious of this concealment. The instant I
perceive this limitation of confidence, he drops into the class of ordinary
men;"
William Godwin, St. Leon (Oxford 1994, p.153/154).
"'Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any
Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.'"
Graham Greene, The Comedians (Harmondsworth, repr.1976,
p.21).
"'Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can
survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed,
we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust,
cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if
we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.'"
Graham Greene, The Comedians (Harmondsworth, repr.1976,
p.139).
"'Don't you understand? To you nothing exists except
in your own thoughts. Not me, not Jones. We're what you choose to make us.
You're a Berkeleyan. My God, what a Berkeleyan. You've turned poor Jones
into a seducer and me into a wanton mistress. You can't even believe in your
mother's medal, can you? You've written her a different part. My dear, try
to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None
of us is like you fancy we are.'"
Graham Greene, The Comedians (Harmondsworth, repr.1976, p.229).
"It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life,
however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons
which can be made with worse times; even in danger and misery the pendulum swings."
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (Harmondsworth, repr.1977,
p.59).