Graham Greene Quotes:

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.

Topics: Hate, Hands, Forgive Me, God Forgive Me

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Topics: Hate, Acceptance, Imagination, Stop Hating

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

source: - The Power and the Glory pt. 1, ch. 1 (1940)

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Spiritual, Joys Of Childhood, Kid At Heart

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.

source: - New York Times, January 8, 1981.

Topics: Love, Depression, Fear, Sometimes I Wonder

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

Topics: Love You, Dark, Smell, Loving Something, I Want To Die

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

Topics: Mercy

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Daring, Feats

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Topics: Typewriters, Hands, Two, Ballpoint Pens, Fountain Pens

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

Topics: Thinking, Night, Luxury, Huts, Pragmatism

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Topics: Truth, Lying, Wine, Best Wine, Liquor Funny

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

Topics: Mistake, Hate, Believe, Unreliability

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Topics: Passion, Jealous, Hatred

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

Topics: Glasses, Alcohol, Understanding, Tacit

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.

Topics: Men, People, Execution

Innocence is a kind of insanity

Topics: Insanity, Innocence, Kind

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.

Topics: Revenge, Worry, Charity

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

Topics: Tired, Sick

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Topics: Pregnancy, Curiosity, Age, Withered

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

Topics: Clothes, Mind, Nails, Mind Love

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

Topics: Happiness, Ignorance, Men, Inner Happiness

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Topics: Dumb, Bells, Literature, Leper, Prudishness

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

Topics: Success, Congratulations, Break, Coastline

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

Topics: Children, Dark, Years, End Of The Tunnel, Light At The End Of The Tunnel

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Topics: Fake People, Distance, Writing, Petty

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

Topics: Soul, Narcissism, Satisfied

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.

Topics: Brother, Father, Jealous

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Looks, Stories, Moments, Good Storytelling

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…

Topics: Love, Loyalty, Understanding

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.

Topics: Hands, Taste, Tongue

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: People, Humanity, Sociology

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

Topics: Happiness, Pain, Identity, Wince

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.

Topics: Fall, Rain, Two, Rain Falling

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

Topics: Memories, Flower, Men, Flopping, Balconies

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.

Topics: Falling In Love, Pain, Father, Love And Pain

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Topics: Hate, Eye, Men

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.

Topics: Believe, Parent, Strange

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

source: - Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.35, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Black And White, Human Nature, Grey

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

Topics: Pain, Writing, Easy

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Doubt

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.

Topics: Christmas, Regret, Holiday, Christmas Cheer, Consoling

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

Topics: Chocolate, Mind, Too Much, Box Of Chocolates

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

Topics: Lying, Truth Is, Champagne

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

Topics: Wish, Littles, Might

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Topics: Moving, Writing, Air, Superficiality, Planning Ahead

I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy." You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time." That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all." You'd make my bed for me?" Perhaps.

Topics: Hate, Sleep, Mind, Being Unhappy, I Want You To Be Happy

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

Topics: Men, Swings, Discovery, Exhilaration, Pendulums

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt

source: - Graham Greene (1983). “The Human Factor”, Viking Press

Topics: Intelligent, Simple, Worst Enemy

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

Topics: People, Generalization, Meaningless

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

source: - Graham Greene (1999). “The Third Man”, Penguin Group USA

Topics: People, Important, Accustomed

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

source: - Graham Greene (1967). “May We Borrow Your Husband ?: And Other Comedies of Sexual Life”, Bodley Head Canada

Topics: Simple, Desire, Companionship

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

Topics: Sweet, Great Inspirational, Mind

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

source: - Graham Greene (1988). “The Captain and the Enemy”

Topics: Money, War, World

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Friendship, Soul, Return

Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

source: - "The Quiet American". Book by Graham Greene, Part IV, Chapter 2, p. 230, 1955.

Topics: Sides, Sooner Or Later, Humans

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

Topics: Mean, Media, Journalism

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Forgiving, Facts, Ifs

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Topics: Kindness, Lying, Thousand, Human Relations, Human Kindness

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

Topics: Ignorance, Good Intentions, Intention

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

source: - "Monsignor Quixote". Book by Graham Greene, 1982.

Topics: Virtue, Lost, Slowness

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

source: - Graham Greene (1966). “The Comedians”

Topics: Looks, Disappoint, Deeper

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

Topics: Sides, Victim, Jokes

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Liars, Lying, Territory

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

Topics: Long, Happens, Anything Is Possible

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

source: - Graham Greene (2000). “The Honorary Consul: A Novel”, p.139, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Long, Priests, Cases

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

source: - Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.99, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Talent, Willing

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

source: - Graham Greene, Carol Reed (1969). “The third man: a film”, Lorrimer Publishing Ltd.

Topics: Love, Peace, Years, Brotherly Love, Cuckoo Clocks

You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Scared, Ends

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

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

Topics: Silence, Desert, Ears

As long as one suffers one lives.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Long, Suffering

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The heart of the matter”

Topics: Death, Near Death, Resigned

It's a good world if you don't weaken.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Brighton rock”

Topics: World, Ifs

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Portable Graham Greene”

Topics: Chaos, Creation, Destruction

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.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “A Burnt-Out Case”, Viking Adult

Topics: Prayer, Men, Class, Slums

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

Topics: Acceptance, Unforgivable Sin, Despair, Evil Man, Hope And Despair

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Long

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “Triple pursuit: a Graham Greene omnibus”, Viking Pr

Topics: Mad, World, Mad World

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Portable Graham Greene”

Topics: Pity, Sociology

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

Topics: Reality, Literature, Century

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

source: - "The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear".

Topics: Pain, Giving, Psychology

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “The Collected Edition: The human factor”

Topics: Fear, Hate, Response

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “Triple pursuit: a Graham Greene omnibus”, Viking Pr

Topics: Glasses, Hands, Guilt

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “The heart of the matter”, Vintage

Topics: Happiness, Joy, Welcome

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Eternity, Absence, Said, Width

We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Details, Stories, Remember

Death was far more certain than God.

source: - 1955 The Quiet American, pt.1, ch.3.

Topics: Certain

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

source: - Graham Greene (1972). “Collected Stories”, Jonathan Cape

Topics: Different, Term, My Time

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

source: - GRAHAM GREENE (1966). “THE COMEDIANS”

Topics: Return

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Truth, Honesty, Kindness, Human Relations, Real Value

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “A Burnt-Out Case”, Viking Adult

Topics: Bible, People, Pity

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: People, Devil, Enormous, Improbability

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Thinking, Differences, Making A Difference

The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

source: - "Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant". Book by Leopoldo Durán, p. 97, 1994.

Topics: Believe, Trouble, Don't Believe

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

Topics: Relationship, Communication, Sentimental, Sentimentality

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

Topics: Happens, Ifs

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “The power and the glory”, Viking Pr

Topics: Home, Glasses, Chairs

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

Topics: Life, Children, Husband

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The heart of the matter”

Topics: Monologues, Discussion, Sooner Or Later

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

source: - Quoted in Radio Times, 10 Sept. 1964

Topics: Powerful, Aphrodisiac, Fame

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Topics: Party, Inspiration, People, Scrap, Observing

Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “The power and the glory”, Viking Pr

Topics: Lust, May, Sin

The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “The Collected Edition: The power and the glory”

Topics: Safety, Argument, Danger

For a good man fame is always a problem.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The Collected Edition: A burnt-out case”

Topics: Men, Good Man, Problem

This (Vietnam) 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.

Topics: Country, Europe, Land

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

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: Sociology, Strikes, Remarkable

Doing nothing, badly.

Topics: Doing Nothing

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

source: - Heart of the Matter (1948) bk. 1, pt. 1, ch. 2

Topics: Beautiful, Clever, War

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “A Burnt-Out Case”, Viking Adult

Topics: Safe, Furniture, Architecture

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “Triple pursuit: a Graham Greene omnibus”, Viking Pr

Topics: Danger, Shocking

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

Topics: Pain, Men, People, Pacifist, Vacuity

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “Collected Stories”

Topics: Dog, Book, Writing, Chekhov, Roughness

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

source: - Graham Greene, Marie-Françoise Allain (1991). “Conversations with Graham Greene”

Topics: Lying, Understanding, Tasks, Those Who Lie

I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

source: - Graham Greene, Marie-Françoise Allain (1991). “Conversations with Graham Greene”

Topics: Writing, Littles, Achieve

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

source: - Graham Greene (1948). “The Heart of the Matter”

Topics: Heart, Two, Cold, Cold Heart, Warm Heart

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

source: - Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.38, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Character, Writing, Differences, Pious, Confessing

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: Relationship, Discovery, Tears, Being Unhappy, Happy Together

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “The Collected Edition: The power and the glory”

Topics: Angel, Light, Ugly

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Talking, Next, Best Things

As the end of the what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

source: - Graham Greene (2010). “May We Borrow Your Husband?”, p.25, Random House

Topics: Disappointment, Betrayal, Simple

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Believe, Men, Wish

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

source: - Graham Greene (1966). “The Comedians”

Topics: Alternatives, Literature, Mask

Never presume yours is a better morality.

source: - Graham Greene (1996). “Travels with My Aunt”, p.39, Oberon Books

Topics: Morality

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: Relationship, Trust, Faith, Without Trust

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 honor - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

Topics: Love Is, Two, Honor

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

Topics: Plot, Fiction, Remember

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: Character, Men, Insane

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

source: - 'The Quiet American' (1955) pt. 1, ch. 3

Topics: Dumb, Would Be, Literature, Leper, Prudishness

One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

source: - Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.42, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Real, Character, Writing

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

source: - Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

Topics: Heart, Misery, Dictator

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

Topics: Hate, I Hate You, Hate You

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

source: - Graham Greene (1992). “The Quiet American”

Topics: Numbers, Suffering, World

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

source: - Graham Greene (1976). “The third man: Loser takes all”, Random House (UK)

Topics: Wise, Being Wise, Young

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

Topics: Eye, Our Love, Bleeding, Small Creatures

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

source: - Graham Greene (1994). “In Search of a Character: Two African Journals”, Penguin USA

Topics: Writing, Novelists, Literature

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

Topics: Youth, Forget

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

Topics: Success, Thinking, Artist

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Discipline, Long, Unhappiness

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Topics: Memories, Imagination, Novelists, Bad Memories, Compost

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.

source: - Graham Greene (1980). “Travels with my aunt”

Topics: Men, Dental Work, Appreciate, Jewellery, Dentistry

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

source: - Graham Greene (1978). “Journey without maps”, Vintage

Topics: Dream, Doors, Nurse

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Portable Graham Greene”

Topics: Country, Patriotism, World

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Knows, Known

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “The Power and the Glory”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

Topics: Love You, Years, Bridges

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.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

Topics: Pain, Memories, Men

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

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

Topics: Innocent, Said

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

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Two, People, Together

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

source: - 1982 Monsignor Quixote, pt.1, ch.9.

Topics: Laughing, Solitary, Superiority

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

source: - Graham Greene (1988). “The Captain and the Enemy”

Topics: Kindness, Literature, God Love, God Loves Us

All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.

source: - Graham Greene (1998). “The Tenth Man”, p.141, Simon and Schuster

Topics: People, Lust, Sorrow

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

Topics: Brain, Capable

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

Topics: Pain, Remembrance, Childhood

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Hate, Nests, Ruins

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Sound, Noble, Desertion

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

source: - "The Comedians". Book by Graham Greene. Part 1, Chapter 4, Section 1, 1966.

Topics: Suicide, Suicidal, Men

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.

source: - "The Potting Shed". Play by Graham Greene, 1957.

Topics: Love, Faith, Fog

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.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “A Burnt-Out Case”, Viking Adult

Topics: Selfish, Expression, Ends

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

source: - 1971 A Sort of Life, preface.

Topics: Errors, May, Biographies, Selective

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.

source: - "Monsignor Quixote". Book by Graham Greene, 1982.

Topics: Wine, Thinking, Blood

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Topics: Insecurity, Twists, Poison, Humdrum

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.

source: - 'The Heart of the Matter' (1948) bk. 1, pt. 1, ch. 2

Topics: Heart, Men, Names

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Liars, Next Week, Years

God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.

source: - "The Collected Edition: The power and the glory".

Topics: Running, Hate, Heart, Walking In The Dark

The problem of pretending to be alive.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Alive, Problem, Pretending

In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Lying, Hands, Promise

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.

source: - Graham Greene (2010). “The End Of The Affair”, p.98, Random House

Topics: Pain, Love You, Kissing

Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

source: - Graham Greene (2010). “The Quiet American”, p.110, Random House

Topics: Voice, Towers, Innocence

At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

source: - 1938 Brighton Rock, pt.1, ch.1.

Topics: Life, Mean, Glasses, Sunny Day, Guinness

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

Topics: Hero, Literature, World

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

source: - Graham Greene (1971). “The Collected Edition: The power and the glory”

Topics: Heart, Fruit, Decay

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Portable Graham Greene”

Topics: Happiness, Loyalty, Literature

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Brighton rock”

Topics: School, Two, Differences

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

Topics: Passion, Giving, Unity, Ruling Passion

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.

Topics: Movie, Book, Actors

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Lonely, Lying, Deserted

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

source: - GRAHAM GREENE (1966). “THE COMEDIANS”

Topics: Break Up, Breakup, Wine, After Breakup, Sad Break Up Love

You cannot love without intuition.

source: - Graham Greene (1992). “The Quiet American”

Topics: Intuition, Instinct

My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.

source: - Graham Greene (1992). “The Quiet American”

Topics: Saws, Titles, Action

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

Topics: Men, Cinema, Sentimental

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

Topics: Disease, Belief, Caught

I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

Topics: Pain, Drinking, Tired, Want Him

Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?

source: - Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

Topics: Children, Childhood, Forever

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

source: - "The Ministry of Fear". Book by Graham Greene. Book 1, Chapter 7, Section 1, 1943.

Topics: Running, Memories, Book, Swordsman

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.

Topics: Children, Blood, Contact

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: Sometimes, Scene, Difficult

Love taught me that your honour did but jest.

Topics: Taught, Jest, Honour

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

Topics: Delay, Life Is, Unhappiness

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

source: - "Graham Greene, How Do You Do It?" by Francis X. Clines, archive.nytimes.com. October 09, 1985.

Topics: Character, Majority, Unconscious

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Disappointment

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

Topics: Passion, Simple, Forever

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

source: - Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

Topics: Vacancy, Crowded

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

source: - Graham Greene (1982). “A Burnt-Out Case”, Viking Adult

Topics: Writing, Doe, Precaution

They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.

source: - "Triple pursuit: a Graham Greene omnibus".

Topics: Believe, Home, Bigger

Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

source: - Graham Greene (1994). “In Search of a Character: Two African Journals”, Penguin USA

Topics: Art, Ducks, Cooking

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

source: - "The Ministry of Fear". Book by Graham Greene. Book 1, Chapter 7, Section 1, 1943.

Topics: Men, Good Man, Ordinary

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

Topics: Travel, Men, Jet Planes, Business Man

I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

source: - Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.37, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Writing, Play, People, Fed Up

Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are all possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Hair, Years, Waiting, Trimming

Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

source: - Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

Topics: Literature, Thrillers

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

source: - Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Topics: Disappointment, Hate, Selfish

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.

Topics: Unions, Soviet Union, Soviet