Graham Greene - Moment Quotes

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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
Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

Graham Greene
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Graham Greene
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

Graham Greene
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

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

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
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
Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?

Graham Greene