Graham Greene quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Graham Greene

Graham Greene Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Graham Greene on Wise Famous Quotes.

There's no such thing as gratitude in politics.

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

They had the comfort of not learning from experience.

He put his mouth on her and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth-thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip.

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.

They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness.

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

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

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

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.

You cannot love without intuition.

Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.

Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible ...

He had stylized himself
life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came.

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.

There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when on finds it.

But we do not love people for what they do for us. Love happens to us; it isn't created.

They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

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

Beware of formulas. If there's a God, he's not a God of formulas.

At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.

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

It's easier to get over a thing" Scobie said, "if you talk about it

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.

Disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

When you feel unable to change your bar you have become old.

Do you like dogs?'
'No.'
'I thought the British were great dog-lovers.'
'We think Americans love dollars, but there must be exceptions.

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

As long as one suffers one lives.

Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.

The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?

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

Rooms don't change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

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.

One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.

He realised that for those who do not love time never stands still.

In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.

Doing nothing, badly.

She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to.

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love.

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

Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan - it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.

To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.

But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I'd have to love your God. I'd rather love the men you slept with.

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

When we are not sure, we are alive.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

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

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

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have a dream of her at night.

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

No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.

Ordinary life goes on
that has saved many a man's reason.

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.

Sometimes it's easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you've made.

Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of tragedy.

All good novelists have bad memories.

I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.

I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, the bank had taught me to be wary of whims.

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

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

There's nothing discreditable about jealousy, Mr Bendrix. I always salute it as the mark of true love.

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

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.

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

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

The only building finished in Duvalierville is the cock-fight stadium.

I thought to myself: 'Is the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth
that God knows nothing.

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