I just finished The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. It felt ominous and dark, with this dreadful sense of foreboding the whole time. I was so fascinated by it. Here are some quotes from it that I really liked.
"It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt" (97).
"Behind the wire-netted windows of the private houses grandmothers swung back and forth in rocking-chairs, among the family photographs--nothing to do, nothing to say, with too many clothes on, sweating a little. This was the capital city of a state" (103).
"This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short" (125).
"When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity...when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination" (131).
"Time depends on clocks and the passage of light" (133).
I loved the feeling that we aren't worthy of being saved, that the priest was a bad priest and yet people were dying to protect him. I loved the idea that we all have an indelible spot inside of us, which is the knowledge of the world; we are all irredeemable. It made me want to read more books about Mexico and about the anti-clerical purges, from a Mexican point of view this time, rather than an English one. I stumble a lot into books about other countries from an English or American perspective. I need to seek out books about those countries from the perspective of people who live there. Greene spent less than a year in Mexico, in 1938.
I felt like we read way too much American contemporary fiction in the MFA program. Occasionally, a Canadian would sneak in and that Canadian was almost always Alice Munro. I understand that you need to know the field that you're trying to publish in. But I got so tired of contemporary American fiction; we read almost nothing in translation. I wasn’t sure if that was because of a mistrust of translation or if it was just an American-centric narrow-mindedness. Anyway, maybe I’ll spend some time reading only books not originally written in English.
