Why, he wondered, swerving in the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on the side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere peoples so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
-Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, 25
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