Graham Greene Quotes

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express. ~ Graham Greene

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn't we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed? ~ Graham Greene

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced. ~ Graham Greene

She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to. ~ Graham Greene

With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge. ~ John Crowley

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone? ... Like a marriage from which love has gone ... And patience, patience everywhere like a fog. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his, his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy, if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow. ~ Graham Greene

I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you. ~ Graham Greene

I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest. ~ Graham Greene

I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate: my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness. I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy. ~ Graham Greene

One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with? ~ Graham Greene

When you feel unable to change your bar you have become old. ~ Graham Greene

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 ~ Graham Greene

He had thought that home was something one possessed, but the things one had possessed were cursed with change; it was what one didn't possess that remained the same and welcomed him. ~ Graham Greene

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us. ~ Graham Greene

Who amongst us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

When you're not a good man yourself you respect a good man. Now I'd prefer to die with a good man around. A good man teaches a lot of nonsense and a bad man teaches truth [...] I'm not the one to teach the boy nonsense. ~ Graham Greene

In a crisis perhaps it is old clichés one clings to, like a child to a parent. ~ Graham Greene

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations ~ Graham Greene

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity ... ~ Graham Greene

Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any monoprix store. it's built into all poor-quality goods. ~ Graham Greene

The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first. ~ Graham Greene

The best smell is bread, the best taste is salt," Graham Greene wrote, adding, "and the best love is that of children. ~ Anonymous

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. ~ Graham Greene

So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. ~ Graham Greene

Married people grow like each other. ~ Graham Greene

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. ~ Graham Greene

I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life? ~ Graham Greene

Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again. ~ Graham Greene

Innocence is a kind of insanity ~ Graham Greene

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience. ~ Graham Greene

In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old. ~ Graham Greene

Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph. ~ Graham Greene

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered. ~ Graham Greene

There are small bits of useless knowledge which stick to one's brain like barnacles to a boat. ~ Graham Greene

...to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory... ~ Graham Greene

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn't enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. 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. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. ~ Graham Greene

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. ~ Graham Greene

Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too. ~ Graham Greene

To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea. ~ Graham Greene

Only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good. ~ Graham Greene

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need. ~ Ross Macdonald

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. ~ Graham Greene

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money. ~ Graham Greene

It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield. ~ Graham Greene

Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked.

T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.'

'What are you going to do? Share them?'

'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. 'We'll burn them,' he said, 'one by one,' and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. 'I'd like to see Old Misery's face when we are through,' T. said.

'You hate him a lot?' Blackie asked.

'Of course I don't hate him,' T. said. 'There'd be no fun if I hated him.' The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. 'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. 'I'll race you home, Blackie,' he said. ("The Destructors") ~ Graham Greene

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin
only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. ~ Graham Greene

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious. ~ Graham Greene

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share. ~ Graham Greene

Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. ~ Graham Greene

For a while we were chasing a book by Graham Greene to do Brighton Rock as a musical. We didn't get the rights, so we decided to create something from scratch, with Jonathan. By that time we were big fans of his work. ~ Neil Tennant

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear. ~ Graham Greene

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable. ~ Graham Greene

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences. ~ Giles Foden

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting. ~ Graham Greene

Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles napped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known. ~ Graham Greene

In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it. ~ Graham Greene

These are touchy times. National sensitivities are on permanent alert and it's getting harder by the moment to say boo to a goose, lest the goose in question belong to the paranoid majority (goosism under threat), the thin-skinned minority (victims of goosophobia), the militant fringe (Goose Sena), the separatists (Goosistan Liberation Front), the increasingly well organised cohorts of society's historical outcasts (the ungoosables, or Scheduled Geese), or the the devout followers of of that ultimate guru duck, the sainted Mother Goose. Why, after all, would any sensible person wish to say boo in the first place? By constantly throwing dirt, such boxers disqualify themselves from serious consideration (they cook their own goose). ~ Graham Greene

You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense. ~ Graham Greene

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied. ~ Graham Greene

Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan - it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth. ~ Graham Greene

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey. ~ Graham Greene

How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a god made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any god wo is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as the air. ~ Graham Greene

I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love. ~ Graham Greene

I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after. ~ Henning Mankell

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity. ~ Graham Greene

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs. ~ Graham Greene

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. ~ Graham Greene

We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It's as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other's misery. But I don't even know the design. ~ Graham Greene

He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime ... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire ... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape. ~ Graham Greene

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline. ~ Graham Greene

Sometimes it's easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you've made. ~ Graham Greene

I can't talk you in terms of time
your time and my time are different ~ Graham Greene

An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in, the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St. Pancras waiting room, Dallow's and Judy's secret lust, and the cold and unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast
whatever it was
got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc
the confession, the penance, and the sacrament
an awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain. ~ Graham Greene

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene

You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels. ~ William Golding

Tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, I never quite understand why English people like teas so. ~ Graham Greene

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. ~ Graham Greene

Hullo, commandant,' I said, 'how's the General?'
'Which general?' he asked with a shy grin.
'Surely in the Caodaist faith,' I said, 'all generals are reconciled. ~ Graham Greene

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend. ~ Graham Greene

I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls ~ Graham Greene

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced ~ Graham Greene

There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good. ~ Graham Greene

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism. ~ Graham Greene

As long as nothing happens anything is possible ... ~ Graham Greene

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there. ~ Graham Greene