Top 276 Quotes & Sayings by Graham Greene - Page 2

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.

As long as one suffers one lives.

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

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

It's a good world if you don't weaken.

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

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.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

All good novelists have bad memories.

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.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

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

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

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.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

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.

As the end of the 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.

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.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

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.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance 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.

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.

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

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