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No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
Graham Greene
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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
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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
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Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.
Graham Greene
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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
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And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.
Graham Greene
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If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
Graham Greene
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I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school—a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.
Graham Greene
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It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.
Graham Greene
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Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
Graham Greene
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The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
Graham Greene
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Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it's what we've all made of the world.
Graham Greene
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The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.
Graham Greene
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I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy." You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time." That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all." You'd make my bed for me?" Perhaps.
Graham Greene
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We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.
Graham Greene
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[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin.
Graham Greene
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The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.
Graham Greene
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A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.
Graham Greene
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It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.
Graham Greene
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It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
Graham Greene
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No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.
Graham Greene
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One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.
Graham Greene
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I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.
Graham Greene
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Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Graham Greene
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
Graham Greene
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
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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