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Graham Greene Quotes | Quotes said by Graham Greene

  • Graham Greene Quote #1

    ... 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.

  • Graham Greene Quote #2

    ... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.

  • Graham Greene Quote #3

    A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

  • Graham Greene Quote #4

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #5

    A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

  • Graham Greene Quote #6

    A man kept his character even when he was insane.

  • Graham Greene Quote #7

    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.

  • Graham Greene Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    As long as one suffers one lives.

  • Graham Greene Quote #10

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #11

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #12

    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 . . .

  • Graham Greene Quote #13

    But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. 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.

  • Graham Greene Quote #14

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #15

    But you do believe, don’t you, Rose implored him, you think it’s true?
    Of course it’s true, the Boy said. What else could there be? he went scornfully on. Why, he said, it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation, he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, torments.
    And Heaven too, Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.
    Oh, maybe, the Boy said, maybe.

  • Graham Greene Quote #16

    Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

  • Graham Greene Quote #17

    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.

  • Graham Greene Quote #18

    Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

  • Graham Greene Quote #19

    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.

  • Graham Greene Quote #20

    Death was far more certain than God.

  • Graham Greene Quote #21

    Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. 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 daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

  • Graham Greene Quote #22

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked.

    T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.'

    'What are you going to do? Share them?'

    'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. 'We'll burn them,' he said, 'one by one,' and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. 'I'd like to see Old Misery's face when we are through,' T. said.

    'You hate him a lot?' Blackie asked.

    'Of course I don't hate him,' T. said. 'There'd be no fun if I hated him.' The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. 'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. 'I'll race you home, Blackie,' he said. (The Destructors)

  • Graham Greene Quote #25

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #26

    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.

  • Graham Greene Quote #27

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

  • Graham Greene Quote #28

    Failure too is a form of death.

  • Graham Greene Quote #29

    For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page—Child's Body Found in Wood.

  • Graham Greene Quote #30

    For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

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