“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”
Source: The Quiet American
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Graham Greene 164
English writer, playwright and literary critic 1904–1991Related quotes
“I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.”
Source: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
For any Artist, LXXXI,Brief Words, The Moray Press, Edinburgh 1935.
“I leave this at your ear for when you awake.”
First line of a poem dedicated to his wife Nessie Dunsmuir, Collected Poems 1942-77, Faber & Faber, London 1979
“Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge.”
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven
“So you start with an impulse and go to what your ear likes.”
Interview with Tony Schwartz in Playboy (February 1984) p. 166
Context: I write from instinct, from inexplicable sparkle. I don't know why I'm writing what I'm writing. Usually, I sit and I let my hands wander on my guitar. And I sing anything. I play anything. And I wait till I come across a pleasing accident. Then I start to develop it. Once you take a piece of musical information, there are certain implications that it automatically contains — the implication of that phrase elongated, contracted, or inverted or in another time signature. So you start with an impulse and go to what your ear likes.
“Never did these thanes of hell escape their just deserts.”
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers
Context: Never did these thanes of hell escape their just deserts. No one ever heard of Harekur or Gongu-Hrolfur or Bernotus being worsted in the final struggle. In the same way no one will be able to say that Bjartur of Summerhouses ever got the worst of it in his world war with the country's specters, no matter how often he might tumble over a precipice or roll head over heels down a gully - "while there's a breath left in my nostrils, it will never keep me down, no matter how hard it blows."