Graham Greene Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

Graham Greene
The beastly adverb—far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.

Graham Greene
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

Graham Greene
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

Graham Greene
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
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Graham Greene
Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

Graham Greene
When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity.... Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Graham Greene
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.

Graham Greene
When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity…

Graham Greene
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 jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Graham Greene
People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.

Graham Greene
One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

Graham Greene
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
Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

Graham Greene
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Graham Greene
Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises...

Graham Greene
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
[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'.

Graham Greene
It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.

Graham Greene
The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.

Graham Greene
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

Graham Greene
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
The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.

Graham Greene
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
The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.

Graham Greene
[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
He had stylized himself—life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

Graham Greene
He was my idol, but to say he influenced me is a bit absurd—like saying a mountain influenced a mouse.

Graham Greene
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