Top 276 Quotes & Sayings by Graham Greene - Page 3

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 clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

The problem of pretending to be alive.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

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.

Have you seen a room from which faith has gone? Like a marriage from which love has gone. And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It's an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

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.

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.

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

A writer doesn't write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

You cannot love without intuition.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

Love taught me that your honour did but jest.

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

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

And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

Never presume yours is a better morality.

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.

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.

Death was far more certain than God.

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.