“The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she u...”
Work
One of Greene’s most powerful novels, the book takes as its theme the era of religious suppression in Mexico during the early 1930’s. An unnamed Catholic priest, an alcoholic with a shameful past in search of either oblivion or redemption, travels through Mexico administering the rites of the church to the poor landless peasants, hunted by a remorseless police officer and always in fear of being betrayed by those he is attempting to help.
Quotes
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Graham Greene
Canonical work source
“The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she u...”
“Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the li...”
“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”
“Nothing in life was as ugly as death.”
“Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of...”
“You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.”
“How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had die...”