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Graham Greene Quotes
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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
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A child, after all, knows most of the game – it is only an attitude to it that he lacks.
Graham Greene
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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
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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
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That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.
Graham Greene
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What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.
Graham Greene
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The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.
Graham Greene
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Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst; you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.
Graham Greene
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The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.
Graham Greene
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[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.
Graham Greene
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He had stylized himself—life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
Graham Greene
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He was my idol, but to say he influenced me is a bit absurd—like saying a mountain influenced a mouse.
Graham Greene
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It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.
Graham Greene
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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
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There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
Graham Greene
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How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.
Graham Greene
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Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.
Graham Greene
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Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Graham Greene
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I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.
Graham Greene
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I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.
Graham Greene
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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
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He'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.
Graham Greene
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Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together
Graham Greene
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No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.
Graham Greene
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To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
Graham Greene
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Graham Greene
Born:
October 2, 1904
Died:
April 3, 1991
(aged 86)
Bio:
Henry Graham Greene was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century.
Known for:
The Quiet American (1955)
The Power and the Glory (1940)
The End of the Affair (1951)
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Brighton Rock (1938)
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Graham Greene on Wikipedia
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