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“I loved a man,"she said. "I told you - a man doesn't alter because you find out more about him. He's still the same man.”
― Graham Greene

“I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.”
― Orson Welles

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it was not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Wells in the doorway in the Third Man.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“Victims?â€� he asked. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,â€� he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving â€� for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money â€� without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.â€� He gave his conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s the only way to save nowadays.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol

“The Ballad of Harry Lime by Stewart Stafford

Harry found existence overrated,
And its shadow, morality, so outdated,
Scurrying rats down here in the sewer,
Porcine gluttons in punished manure.

Grand aspirations from primordial slime,
Lifting up the rock from time to time,
Samson, destroying a temple of hypocrisy,
And every pillar - hope, faith and charity,

They'd had him from baptism's font,
Trapped before wording his wants,
A heel dipped in brackish liturgy,
Silent collusion in mass duplicity.

For those who remained in smoky rubble?
Rudely awakened from a cocoon bubble:
An obelisk erected to grotesque finance,
Charon’s fee for a Stygian dance.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford