The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

📖 124/225

📖
After reading Dune I just had this desire to read The Power and the Glory. Not sure why but I'm going for it.

This year's goal is to read mostly books off my own shelves that have been waiting there for years. This is one of those books. Inside was the original receipt of purchase and it has been on my shelves since 2019!

Do you tuck original receipts in your books?

Quotes (and Notes) from The Power and the Glory:

gray and white concrete building during daytime
Photo by Jezael Melgoza / Unsplash

Notes:

  • The beginning of this book to me felt so intense and visual - cinematic. Already, I like it.
  • I'm a lover of a good description and/or simile and there are many right away in this book:
    • "He had protuberant eyes; he gave an impression of unstable hilarity, as if perhaps he had been celebrating a birthday, alone." (pg. 11)
    • "Pride wavered in his voice like a plant with shallow roots." (pg. 14)
    • "He sat there like a black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair." (pg. 15)

Quotes:

  • "Happiness drained out of him more quickly and completely than out of an unhappy man: an unhappy man is always prepared." (pg. 38)
  • "The usually happy and the always unhappy one watched the night thicken from the bed with distrust.They were companions cut off from all the world: there was no meaning anywhere outside their own hearts: they were carried like children in a coach through the huge spaces without any knowledge of their destination. He began to hum with desperate cheerfulness a song of the war years: he wouldn't listen to the footfall in the yard outside, going in the direction of the barn." (pg. 41)
  • "...he went alone across the plaza to the police station, a little dapper figure of hate carrying his secret of love." (pg. 60)
  • "He followed her meekly tripping once in the long peon's trousers with the happiness wiped off his face and the smile somehow left behind like the survivor of a shipwreck."(pg. 66)
  • "How often the priest had head the same confession - Man was so limited he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and head about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good and beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt." (pg. 100)