Graham Greene Quotes

Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

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

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

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.

They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

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.

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

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

The problem of pretending to be alive.

Hatred seems to work 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?

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

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

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

Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

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

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

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

For a good man fame is always a problem.

To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

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

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt

Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

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.

The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.

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?

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.

Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

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.

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

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone? Like a marriage from which love has gone. And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.

People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

Failure too is a form of death.

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

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.