Graham Greene Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

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.

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.

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.

If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.

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.

Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

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.

To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.

O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

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

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.

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

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Doing nothing, badly.

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.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

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

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

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.

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

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.

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

She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.

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 name?

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