The voices / 198 fragments

Graham Greene

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗love knowledge faith mind death time happiness truth

Archive entries

01Undated

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.

Graham Greene / quote

02Undated

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

Graham Greene / quote

03Undated

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

Graham Greene / quote

04Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

05Undated

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

Graham Greene / quote

06Undated

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.

Graham Greene / quote

07Undated

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

Graham Greene / quote

08Undated

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

Graham Greene / quote

09Undated

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

Graham Greene / quote

10Undated

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

Graham Greene / quote

11Undated

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Graham Greene / quote

12Undated

Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.

Graham Greene / quote

13Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

14Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

15Undated

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

Graham Greene / quote

16Undated

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it.

Graham Greene / quote

17Undated

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Graham Greene / quote

18Undated

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

Graham Greene / quote

19Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

20Undated

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.

Graham Greene / quote

21Undated

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Graham Greene / quote

22Undated

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.

Graham Greene / quote

23Undated

She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.

Graham Greene / quote

24Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote