Brighton Rock - Quotations

• Pinkie: 'of course there's Hell. Flames and damnation'
• narrator: 'you cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God'
• about Pinkie's death: 'it was as if he'd been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence'
• about Pinkie: 'it was as if the flames had literally got him'
• Ida: 'I know the difference between Right and Wrong'
• Rose: 'the two words [Right and Wrong] meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods-Good and Evil'
• Ida: 'It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.'
• Pinkie: 'Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust'
• about Rose: 'The Nelson Place eyes stared back..driven to her hole, the small animal peered out'
• 1. 'She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts...'
• 1. "I don't take any stock in religion."
• 1. "It was as if he'd been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence - past or presence, whipped away into zero - nothing."
• 1. Sex disturbed him like a sickness.
• "He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.
• 1. The slatey eyes were touched with an annihilating eternity
• 1. Her big breasts... felt a merciless compassion.
• 1. Eye for an eye.
• 1. She rose like a warship moving into action.
• 1. "Only the devil ... could have made her answer like that."
• “a pale thing girl younger than himself"
• 1. Something in common... youth and shabbiness
• 1. " Her quiet, her pallor, her desire to please "