Epigraphs and Epitaphs

In reading through all of the wonderful final responses here to Greene's work, I was again reminded of Greene's chosen epigraph for all of his work:

Our interests's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, the demi-rep
That loves and saves her soul in her new French books --
We watch as these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.

First, I love how the poem uses the first-person plural. It's as if we too -- this class -- are right there with Greene in sharing this interest. But I was thinking about how this quotation relates to the runner-up for collected-works-epigraph: "Hate was just a failure of the imagination." As Pico Iyer says, this is Greene's work in seven words. So how do we make sense of both?

Well, I started to think that perhaps, in order to have that interest in the first place, in order to even begin to accept that a murderer could be tender or a thief could be honest, you need to, well, imagine. Hate allows us to conveniently, cleanly write another person off. How easy it is to decide not to try to understand someone: Oh, he's just an angry person, we might think. Or, Forget her: she's just bitter.

What I am trying to say is that the unimaginative person would not be interested in the "dangerous edge of things." For this kind of person, humans can't possibly be, at once, ambivalent; there is no grey for these folks, only black and white. When we begin to imagine -- itself an act of empathy -- what motivates the "honest thief" or the "quiet American" or the "whiskey priest", hate slinks away in defeat because it's lost its simple target. Hate can't tolerate complexity. Hate doesn't traffic in ambiguities. When imagination chances upon a hidden pain in a fellow human being, it forces one to accept that there is more -- much more -- to a person than originally thought. And isn't this love? The acceptance, if not the appreciation for our beloved's contradictions? Isn't this what makes mankind so wondrous?