GGGraham Greene

198 collected words

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.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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 / quote

02Undated

He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.

Graham Greene / quote

03Undated

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

Graham Greene / quote

04Undated

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.

Graham Greene / quote

05Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

06Undated

There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.

Graham Greene / quote

07Undated

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.

Graham Greene / quote

08Undated

It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.

Graham Greene / quote

09Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

10Undated

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

Graham Greene / quote

11Undated

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

Graham Greene / quote

12Undated

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

Graham Greene / quote

13Undated

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

Graham Greene / quote

14Undated

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.

Graham Greene / quote

15Undated

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.

Graham Greene / quote

16Undated

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. 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.

Graham Greene / quote

17Undated

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

Graham Greene / quote

18Undated

It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.

Graham Greene / quote

19Undated

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

Graham Greene / quote

20Undated

Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Graham Greene / quote

21Undated

Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.

Graham Greene / quote

22Undated

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

Graham Greene / quote

23Undated

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.

Graham Greene / quote

24Undated

There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.

Graham Greene / quote