Graham Greene - Death Quotes

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I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.

Graham Greene
In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?

Graham Greene
Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Graham Greene
It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Graham Greene
From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Graham Greene
Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals.

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
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
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
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
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
We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Graham Greene