She stared out at the dingy Midland station with dismay. It seemed to her that everything which made her life worth the effort of living was lost; she hadn’t even got a job (...) The train began to move by the waiting-rooms, the lavatories, the sloping concrete into a waste of rails
This quote is a very good example of how well Graham Greene marries internal feeling or emotion to external reality to reinforce both. The character in question is feeling 'dismay', a sensation matched by the 'sloping concrete' and 'waste of rails'. Concrete is grey and the image of a 'waste of rails' does not have positive connotations in the slightest. The station, furthermore, is 'dingy'.
'Murder didn't mean much to Raven. It was just a new job.'
These two sentences open Greene's novel and immediately allude to what will take place in the novel: murder. Raven, the protagonist of the novel, is presented as cold and emotionless, with the narrator telling us that 'It was just a new job'. In this second sentence, all the words are monosyllabic, an effect which makes out that killing someone is simple: it is 'just a new job' that someone has to do.
'His most vivid emotion was venom.'
Greene is known for his pithy asides and this one is particularly powerful, largely because of the alliteration of 'v' in 'vivid' and 'venom'. The alliteration highlights Raven's emotional outlook on life and reinforces the idea that he is only out for himself and angry with the world.
'There won't be a war.'
'The last one started with a murder.'
'That was an Archduke. This is just an old politician.'
This dialogue takes place early on in the novel between Anne Crowder and Jimmy Mather, who are dating. Mather is a detective who ends up investigating the murder Raven commits and it is this murder that the pair are referring to here. Anne, when she says 'The last one started with a murder', is making a reference to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, an event widely seen as the first in a long line that led to the outbreak of the First World War. Published in 1936, 'A Gun for Sale' possibly takes inspiration from the case of Princip, who Raven could be seen to based on. Ironically, in the novel there is nearly a war as a result of the murder of this 'just an old politician'.
