Graham Greene Quotes

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

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.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

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.

Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream.

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 possibility of love dying.

The truth 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.

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

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

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

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

Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

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

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

It's a good world if you don't weaken.

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

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

The world doesn't make any heroes anymore.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

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.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

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.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy." You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time." That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all." You'd make my bed for me?" Perhaps.

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

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?

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.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

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