Graham Greene Quotes

Biography

Type: Writer

Born: 2 October 1904

Died: 3 April 1991 (aged 86)

Henry Graham Greene was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted, in 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective.

Graham Greene Quotes

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.. Graham Greene
Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

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

I recognized my work for what it was-as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one
I recognized my work for what it was-as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?

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

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

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

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

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them,
I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is
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.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being -
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.. Graham Greene
Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when
Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him
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.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that
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.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

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

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she
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.

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.

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

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory-or for ever.

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it.

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

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

Beware of formulas. If there's a God, he's not a God of formulas.

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

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?

disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;

Knowledge was the great thing-not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'
Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods-Good and Evil.

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.

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

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.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

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

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.

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

It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more-darkness.

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.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

I can't talk you in terms of time -your time and my time are different

He realised that for those who do not love time never stands still.

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

I'm afraid of the dark.' And his mother: 'Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid in the dark.' But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

who amongst us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?

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.

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 . . .

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

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain-nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

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

It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country.

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.

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

In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.

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

I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.

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.

Married people grow like each other.

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.

... 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.

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.

There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

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

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

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.

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.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.

I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school-a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

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

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

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

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