He had the funny feeling that doors long bolted within him were being forced, that in the general amnesty of carnival something jailed in him since p… - John Crowley

I’m sorry, really, to be taking it all from you. Don’t be silly. His eyes, large, liquid, remote, were — were whatever is the opposite of silly. She felt no anger at him, and not envy; she did want him to have her house; only — for a wild moment — wanted desperately not to lose it either. She wanted to share it, share it all; she wanted…He went on looking at her, fixedly and unashamedly as a cat; and there came a flaw in time, a doubling of this moment, a shadow scene behind this scene, in which he asked her to come now, come to stay, stay now, stay always, yield it all to him and yet have it all…. As instantly as she perceived it, the flaw healed, and No, no, she said, blinking, turning back to the kitchen door, shaken, as though, unaware, she had found herself walking out on ice.

With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.

There is more than one history of the world.