Graham Greene Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

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

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

Graham Greene
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

Graham Greene
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
That is a genuine duty we owe society, to be a piece of grit in the State machinery.
Of writers

Graham Greene
[Priest at Hale's cremation] "... our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."

Graham Greene
There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

Graham Greene
I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

Graham Greene
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.

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
Isn't disloyalty as much the writer's virtue as loyalty is the soldier's.

Graham Greene
I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change 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. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…

Graham Greene
I have often noticed that a bribe... has that effect — it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.

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

Graham Greene
You cannot control what you love—you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

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

Graham Greene
Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it's built into all poor-quality goods.

Graham Greene
You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Graham Greene
Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. 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.

Graham Greene
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.

Graham Greene
Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Graham Greene
[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality.... He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:... when all the time it was a country the stranger knew...

Graham Greene
He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.

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, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.

Graham Greene
Surely we choose our death as much as we choose our job. It grows out of our acts and our evasions, out of our fears and out of our moments of courage.

Graham Greene
A child, after all, knows most of the game – it is only an attitude to it that he lacks.

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

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
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