Graham Greene Quotes

No human being can really understand another and no one can arrange another's happiness.
Graham Greene
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Graham Greene
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Graham Greene
At the end of 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.
Graham Greene
Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Graham Greene
When we are not sure we are alive.
Graham Greene
Hatred seems to operate 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?
Graham Greene
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
Graham Greene
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?
Graham Greene
One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Graham Greene
Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
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
I'm not involved, not involved," I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. 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.
Graham Greene
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
Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men
Graham Greene
Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
Graham Greene
That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. 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.
Graham Greene
one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.
Graham Greene
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.
Graham Greene
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
Graham Greene
He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?
Graham Greene
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
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
Graham Greene
That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight.
Graham Greene
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.
Graham Greene
Innocence is a kind of insanity
Graham Greene
He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
Graham Greene
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
Graham Greene
Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.
Graham Greene
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
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
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.
Graham Greene
A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.
Graham Greene
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.
Graham Greene
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. 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.
Graham Greene
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
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.
Graham Greene
-"-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...".
Graham Greene
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
I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
Graham Greene
My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.
Graham Greene
It's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about it
Graham Greene
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim
Graham Greene
I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.
Graham Greene
He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
Graham Greene
One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.
Graham Greene
Death was far more certain than God.
Graham Greene
It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors")
Graham Greene
The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.
Graham Greene
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.
Graham Greene
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.
Graham Greene
Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.
Graham Greene
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.
Graham Greene
For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.
Graham Greene
There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.
Graham Greene
New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.
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
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
Graham Greene
For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation
Graham Greene
Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.
Graham Greene