Graham Greene Quotes

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.

~ Graham Greene

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

~ Graham Greene

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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?

~ Graham Greene

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

~ 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

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

~ Graham Greene

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?

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

~ Graham Greene

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - 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. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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?

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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?

~ Graham Greene

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind, until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.

~ Graham Greene

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

~ Graham Greene

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

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

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.

~ Graham Greene

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

~ Graham Greene