Graham Greene Quotes

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

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

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.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful

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

He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.

There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.

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.

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.

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

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.

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

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

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

Whew, ' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did.

... and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.

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

Married people grow like each other.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

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

Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

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

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

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.

... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.

I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

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

Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow, " Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet.

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim

It's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about it

-"-A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge."-"If you knew how little you had to revenge...".

I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.

Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.

But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. 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.

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.

He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?