[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin. - Graham Greene

People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.

And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.

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