Graham Greene - Life Quotes

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It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

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
An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

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

Graham Greene
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
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
Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it's what we've all made of the world.

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
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
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
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
I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.

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

Graham Greene
At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

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
Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

Graham Greene
Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

Graham Greene
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay.

Graham Greene
... the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks.

Graham Greene
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

Graham Greene
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

Graham Greene
However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

Graham Greene