Optimism

Flowers, Ida thought scornfully; that wasn’t life. Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, Ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post and the colours go bobbing up… What was the sense of dying if it made you babble of flowers? … She took life with deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in. To lose your lover—’broken hearts,’ she would say, ‘always mend,’ to be maimed or blinded—’lucky,’ she’d tell you, ‘to be alive at all.’ There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism, whether she was laughing in Henekey’s or weeping at a funeral or a marriage.

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Good sketch of one of the main characters. I admire writers like Greene and Dickens, who can evoke a character with depth and contradictions in a single paragraph.