Graham Greene Quotes

When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one e...

Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.' He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his...

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the fla...

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance ...

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

New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A...

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly a...

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

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

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have...

Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Not...

Innocence is a kind of insanity

I'm not involved, not involved," I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition...

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I...

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. ...

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should f...

It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A ma...

Death was far more certain than God.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to unde...

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets insid...

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the ...

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of ...

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got ...

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of mu...

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever...

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

Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against...

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

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

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

That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need ...

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been reali...

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quali...

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity...

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

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the gr...

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint c...

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a...

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

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't ...

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be th...

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him ...

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

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

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

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of...

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

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

There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on wa...

Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the th...

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it...

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

In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, th...

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crud...

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more t...

He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would m...

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

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

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

He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the se...

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. ...

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs...

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathe...

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

One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is h...

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

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

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamon...

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

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

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute sil...

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had bee...

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

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

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he though...

A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do exce...

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every ...

It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wonde...

Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only ...

Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I elimin...

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothi...

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

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering a...

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware...

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

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

For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the tim...

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human...

Married people grow like each other.

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to m...

I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of v...

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

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

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