Graham Greene Famous Quotes
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One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?
For a good man fame is always a problem.
Fun ... human nature ... does no one any harm ... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain
nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
All right. All right.' He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape left, nothing you could touch and say: this is Scobie.
Oh, it's not done,' I said, 'but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy's fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It's part of modern life. I've done most of them myself.
Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.
He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.
I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
Do you like dogs?'
'No.'
'I thought the British were great dog-lovers.'
'We think Americans love dollars, but there must be exceptions.
A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
In the vision there is no morality
I ought to write funny books. Life is really too horribly funny, but unless one`s an outsider looking on, it`s all such a bore.
That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don't write that as a sneer; there are so many of us who can't)
I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls
The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.
What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days
and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins
impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity
cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.
You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace-he needs it more.
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.
I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet ... He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability
For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation
I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.
There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.
What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?
To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
Perhaps all life was like that
dull and then a heroic flurry at the end.
Fear is easily experienced, but fun is hard to come by in old age, so I already felt a sense of gratitude to General Omar Torrijos.
The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.
Sometimes it's easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you've made.
You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.
The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so I suppose we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman ...
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted.
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.
I can't talk you in terms of time
your time and my time are different
You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.
There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.
Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.
A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.
In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.
All, Pyle? Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. THen you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who last until you are through.
You don't bless what you love ... It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway ... We have to bless what we hate ... It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.
Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.
I know myself, and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually. Sometimes this is mistaken by the innocent for unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good - in this case postponement in attending to my hurt - for the sake of a far greater good) a peace of mind when I need think only of myself.
She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?
As long as there is a Church, there will be little Torquemadas
It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?
As they pedalled us down the long suburban road to the Chinese town a line of French armoured cars went by, each with its jutting gun and silent officer motionless like a figurehead under the stars and the black, smooth, concave sky––trouble again probably with a private army, the Binh Xuyen, who ran the Grand Monde and the gambling halls of Cholon. This was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.
It isn't. when you come to think of it a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything
so they believe and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.
The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who ... '
'Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.'
'I don't remember that.'
'The history books gloss it over.
I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations ... I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.
There's only things, Blackie.
You have a sense of humour. I am in favor of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
But she wouldn't pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasn't that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all one's belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasn't loading the dice.
The Lord is my shepherd. But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher.
Perhaps we were looking strained in our manner, because I noticed we had attracted the attention of a little man who sat on a sofa not far off. I tried to outstare him and that was easy. He had a long moustache and fawn-like eyes and he looked hurriedly away: his elbow caught his glass of beer and spun it on to the floor, so that he was overcome with confusion. I was sorry then because it occurred to me that he might have recognized me from my photographs: he might even be one of my few readers. He had a small boy sitting with him, and what a cruel thing it is to humiliate a father in the presence of his son. The boy blushed scarlet when the waiter hurried forward, and his father began to apologize with unnecessary vehemence.
Disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;
I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.
I loved a man,"she said. "I told you - a man doesn't alter because you find out more about him. He's still the same man.
Oh, I'm not a Berkeleian. I believe my back's against this wall. I believe there's a sten gun over there.
I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.
One can't always be wise, can one, in a world like this?
It's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about it
So one always starts a journey in a strange land
taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all.
One can go back to one's own home after a year's absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.
I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines.
And then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.
Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.
Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet.
You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. 'You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.' It was as if in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read 'goodbye.
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.
In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.
Rooms don't change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.
Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can't realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.
Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.'
He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day.
I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it form what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spend, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend.
American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.
The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.
When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice.
The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.
Destruction after all is a form of creation.
Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?
For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.
Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alignments at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll. [p107]
I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about.
As long as one suffers one lives.