[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'. - Graham Greene

Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.

It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.