Top 100 Graham Greene Quotes
#1. Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?
Graham Greene
#2. Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
Graham Greene
#3. 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)
Graham Greene
#4. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
Graham Greene
#5. 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.
Graham Greene
#6. Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
Graham Greene
#7. 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 ...
Graham Greene
#8. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape
anywhere
for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
Graham Greene
#9. At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.
Graham Greene
#10. There's no such thing as gratitude in politics.
Graham Greene
#11. 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.
Graham Greene
#12. It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
#13. There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself ...
Graham Greene
#14. I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.
Graham Greene
#15. A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Graham Greene
#16. Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness
Graham Greene
#17. When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.
Graham Greene
#18. A romantic is usually afraid in case reality doesn't come up to expectations.
Graham Greene
#19. When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food.
Graham Greene
#20. The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
Graham Greene
#21. 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.
Graham Greene
#22. The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety. (The Power and the Glory)
Graham Greene
#23. 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
#24. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have a dream of her at night.
Graham Greene
#26. Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.
Graham Greene
#27. He felt the sad relief of a man who realizes that there is one love at least that no longer hurts him.
Graham Greene
#28. I think, for the writer, rather as for the priest, there isn't such a thing as success.
Graham Greene
#29. 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.
Graham Greene
#30. People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren't reasonable, are they?
Graham Greene
#31. They haven't left us much to believe in, have they?
even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.
Graham Greene
#32. 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.
Graham Greene
#33. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.
Graham Greene
#34. It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
Graham Greene
#35. Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
Graham Greene
#36. I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.
Graham Greene
#37. No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.
Graham Greene
#38. I think I have always liked my fellow men. Liking is a great deal safer than love. It doesn't demand victims. Who is your victim, Querry?
Graham Greene
#39. 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
#40. I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.
Graham Greene
#41. Ordinary life goes on
that has saved many a man's reason.
Graham Greene
#42. Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
Graham Greene
#43. 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.
Graham Greene
#44. And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I've reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.
Graham Greene
#45. To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.
Graham Greene
#46. Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now - not desire, but only the reminder of it?
Graham Greene
#47. 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
#48. Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.
Graham Greene
#49. I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said.
'You'd prefer worms?'
'Yes, I would.
Graham Greene
#50. 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.
Graham Greene
#51. My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.
Graham Greene
#52. There's nothing discreditable about jealousy, Mr Bendrix. I always salute it as the mark of true love.
Graham Greene
#53. We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.
Graham Greene
#54. 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
#55. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?
Graham Greene
#56. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.
Graham Greene
#57. Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
Graham Greene
#58. I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.
Graham Greene
#59. You do not always say goodbye to those you love beside a deathbed, in an atmosphere of leisure and incense.
Graham Greene
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
Graham Greene
#64. 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.
Graham Greene
#65. What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
Graham Greene
#66. In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all." ( ... ) Crabbin said, "He was just a popular entertainer."
"Why the hell not?" Martins said fiercely.
"Oh well, I merely meant ... "
"What was Shakespeare?
Graham Greene
#67. 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
#68. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.
Graham Greene
#69. Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?
Graham Greene
#70. For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.
Graham Greene
#71. The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
Graham Greene
#72. Beware of formulas. If there's a God, he's not a God of formulas.
Graham Greene
#73. The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Graham Greene
#74. There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.
Graham Greene
#75. Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
Graham Greene
#76. You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
Graham Greene
#78. I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
Graham Greene
#79. He was feeling happy. It was one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (The Power and the Glory)
Graham Greene
#80. God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
Graham Greene
#81. A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
Graham Greene
#82. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.
Graham Greene
#83. Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.
Graham Greene
#84. The more unstable life is the less one likes the small details to alter.
Graham Greene
#85. 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
#86. 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
#88. 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.
Graham Greene
#89. 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.
Graham Greene
#90. Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
Graham Greene
#91. 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.
Graham Greene
#92. But we do not love people for what they do for us. Love happens to us; it isn't created.
Graham Greene
#94. I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.
Graham Greene
#95. I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.
Graham Greene
#96. To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.
Graham Greene
#97. Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.
Graham Greene
#98. 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
#99. He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared.
Graham Greene
#100. 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.
Graham Greene
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