Graham Greene Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

Graham Greene
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Graham Greene
Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

Graham Greene
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

Graham Greene
Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

Graham Greene
You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other...

Graham Greene
He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness—the sense that that is where we really belong.

Graham Greene
People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.

Graham Greene
God... created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution.

Graham Greene
Sooner or later... one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

Graham Greene
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Graham Greene
We mustn't complain too much of being comedians—it's an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.

Graham Greene
All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.

Graham Greene
Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.

Graham Greene
But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent.

Graham Greene