The Power And The Glory Quotes
"A man may look. I’ve lived alone for fifteen years."
"We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere."
"You remember this place before – before the Red Shirts came?"
"He felt no sympathy at all with the weakness of the flesh."
"A prayer demanded an act and he had no intention of acting."
"You cannot control what you love – you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead."
"You deserve nothing less than the truth – a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose."
"He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert."
"She carried her responsibilities carefully like crockery across the hot yard."
"He felt no conviction when he added, ‘She’s just a kid.’"
"Life hadn’t got at her yet; she had a false air of impregnability."
"You could look at nothing for long without becoming aware that it, too, carried the germ."
"Somewhere, in one of the women’s huts, someone was singing – ‘I went down to my field and there I found a rose.’"
"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."
"The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling through, wiping out this and that."
"For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind – a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret – the rubble of his failures."
"Heaven is where there is no jefe, no unjust laws, no taxes, no soldiers and no hunger. Your children do not die in heaven."
"The Church taught that it was every man’s first duty to save his own soul."
"It is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty."
"Life without books, without contact with educated men, had peeled away from his memory everything but the simplest outline of the mystery."
"In my eyes – can’t you understand – you are worth far more than he is. I want to give you everything."
"Watch and pray, the devil like a raging lion..."
"It was a good thing that the world’s traitor should be made a figure of fun."
"A man like me sometimes feels that he would do anything for a few pesos."
"I possess exactly fifteen pesos seventy-five centavos in the world. I haven’t eaten myself for forty-eight hours."
"He is a very important man. He is the cousin of the Governor – he can get anything for you, anything at all."
"Anyone can tell a drinker. You’ll want to come back for more."
"It’s good stuff he sells. Better give me the fifteen pesos."
"You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth."
"Sometimes I miss her. I called her 'my little friend'."
"The comfort is that he is probably a saint and that he prays for us."
"We don’t know. It may be. But I’m a bad priest, you see. I know – from experience – how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell."
"Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair."
"For peace you needed human company – his aloneness was like a threat of things to come."
"A man’s first duty is to himself – even the Church taught that, in a way."
"Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith – faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead."
"There was nothing you could do except put one foot forward and then the other."
"He could feel life retreating from him all the time."
"You didn’t expect to find another person underground."
"You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn't that right?"
"It's no good your working for your end unless you're a good man yourself."
"I thought I was a fine fellow to have stayed when the others had gone."
"I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just want justice, that's all."
"The smaller the temptation, the bigger the sin."
"Pain was a fact, but perhaps pain could be endured without a movement of hate."
"The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit."
"Fear can be more tiring than a long monotonous ride."
"The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water."
"It would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage."
"What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled."
"It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint."
"I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived."
"He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place."