Brighton Rock Quotes

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

It's a good world if you don't weaken.

It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present - she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

He put his mouth on her and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth-thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip.

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.

Don't you believe it. I'll tell you what life is. It's gaol, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It's dying slowly.

He laughed again: the horror of the world lay like infection in his throat.

She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers

But you do believe, don’t you," Rose implored him, "you think it’s true?" "Of course it’s true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments." "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe.

He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape.

You talk too easily,’ the Boy said. ‘Talk?’ Mr Prewitt said. ‘I could shake the world. Let them put me in the dock if they like. I’ll give them—revelation. I’ve sunk so deep I carry—’ he was shaken by an enormous windy self-esteem—he hiccupped twice—‘the secrets of the sewer.

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

...trying to extricate from the long day the grain of pleasure

He stumbled on an old boot and put his hand on the stones to save himself: they had all the cold of the sea and had never been warmed by sun under these pillars.

Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alignments at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll. [p107]

She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust.

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

This one had come to me, though, picked me out. I thought she was trouble from the start. I don't read minds and I can't see the future, but call it instinct or experience, something was prickling my spine. You could call it something else, if you wanted: adolescence, hormones, lust. Being seventeen. That doesn't go away, however long you practice. "Hullo," I said politely, warily. She was long and slim and very neatly put together, dark hair tumbling over denim, old worn black jacket and jeans that somehow hadn't faded into grey. They probably didn't dare. Right from the start I saw a focus in her, a determination that must go all the way through, like the writing in a stick of Brighton rock. In another world, another lifetime, I thought she'd have raven-feathers in her hair, a bear's tooth on a thong about her. She'd be the village shaman, talking to spirits, and even the headman would be afraid of her, a little... Seventeen, I told you. She was devastating to me, she was sitting at my table, and I couldn't afford her. Not for a minute. If I'd stood up, if I'd left, if I'd run away... Nah. She would just have come after me. Faster, fitter, and on longer legs. What chance did I ever have?

She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn’t living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present—she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

Driven to her hole the small animal peered out at the bright and breezy world; in the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty, fidelity and the love and fear of God, but the small animal had not the knowledge to deny that only in the glare and open world outside was something which people called experience.

The music pealed on under the Chinese lanterns and the pink spotlight featured the singer holding the microphone closer to his starched shirt. ‘You been in love?’ the Boy asked sharply and uneasily. ‘Oh yes,’ Rose said. The Boy retorted with sudden venom, ‘You would have been. You’re green. You don’t know what people do.

From behind he looked younger than he was in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips, but when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went.

He tried to scream: no death was so bad as drowning. The deck of the pier lay at a steep angle like that of a liner on the point of its deadly dive; he scrambled

… She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness

and heads close together like parrots,

What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn’t get along without goodness.

At one with the One—it didn’t mean a thing beside a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

more earth-bound fiction and especially to shake off the ‘Catholic novelist’ tag, which first took hold with Brighton Rock; Greene would often say that he was ‘not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic’.3 A memorable phrase, it is more accurate as a description of the second half of his career than of the first. Indeed, it seems that the middle-aged Graham Greene was trying to cover his intellectual and artistic tracks.

Brighton Rock certainly raised his profile in the United States, as Viking put a good deal of effort into advance publicity for its new author. The New York Times declared the novel ‘as elegant a nightmare as you will find in a book this season . . . a revival of the Poe manner – modernized with streamlined abnormal psychology and lit by neon’.3 In England, the book was enough of a hit

There were coloured etchings of great delicacy and an interesting study of the "Old Harry" rock in the days when "His Wife" stood proudly by his side. It was of course, in the early years of this century that the latter disappeared during a storm which wrecked the Old Chain Pier at Brighton, but Mr Berens has lived long enough in Studland to have seen the pair stand united and to transpose them to his canvas.

When I came up from Brighton by the train’: a rich Guinness voice, a voice from a public bar.

he looked as a man might look who owned the whole world, the whole

When Nick started the label, he put us in Pink Floyd’s studio in Britannia Row,” says Del incredulously. “It was massive, and when you went upstairs, they still had that big pink pig up there. It was phenomenally expensive, about £500 a day, maybe more, which was a lot of money in 1983. We had the studio block-booked for a month, and we never used to go. It was always empty; we’d be back in Brighton doing loads of mushrooms and acid! I’d be tripping all night, get up about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, go to the pub, and suddenly remember I should be in the studio doing guitars, and I’d just blow it out and go back to bed.