Graham Greene Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

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
There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

Graham Greene
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
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
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
That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

Graham Greene
... he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.

Graham Greene
"God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good."

Graham Greene
Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too, but it doesn't talk about love.

Graham Greene
Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

Graham Greene
He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.

Graham Greene
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
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
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
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
I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

Graham Greene
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
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
It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

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

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

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

Graham Greene