Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the deep longing of a lover to also fulfill the roles of a father and a brother, highlighting feelings of jealousy over missed time together.
In this quote, Graham Greene explores the complex emotions tied to love and familial relationships. The speaker reflects on the desire to encompass multiple roles within a romantic relationship, illustrating a longing to share experiences and time that could enhance their bond. This yearning reveals an underlying jealousy for the moments that have been lost or unshared, emphasizing the interconnectedness of love, family, and time.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a relationship workshop to discuss the complexities of love and family roles.
More from Graham Greene
All quotes →It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?
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 ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Similar quotes
I'm so lucky to have been raised the way I have, because my parents believed that everyone had the right to their own feelings, opinions, and existence; as long as they weren't harming others, you had to defend those rights.
What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.
Where Negroes provide 20 percent of the vote, they should have 20 per cent of the jobs.
And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.
Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.