GGGraham Greene

198 collected words

Graham Greene

Life dates: 1904 AD — 1991 AD

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

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

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1947 AD

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

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02c. 1947 AD

Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

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03c. 1947 AD

Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.

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04c. 1947 AD

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

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05c. 1947 AD

For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page—"Child's Body Found in Wood.

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06c. 1947 AD

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

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07c. 1947 AD

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

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08c. 1947 AD

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

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09c. 1947 AD

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.

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10c. 1947 AD

If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

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11c. 1947 AD

But she wouldn't pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasn't that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all one's belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasn't loading the dice.

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12c. 1947 AD

In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

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13c. 1947 AD

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

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14c. 1947 AD

Hate is a lack of imagination.

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15c. 1947 AD

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.

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16c. 1947 AD

When you visualized a man or 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.

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17c. 1947 AD

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.

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18c. 1947 AD

I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

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19c. 1947 AD

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.

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20c. 1947 AD

... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.

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21c. 1947 AD

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

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22c. 1947 AD

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. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

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23c. 1947 AD

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.

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24c. 1947 AD

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

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