Graham greene quotes

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.

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's a good world if you don't weaken.

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

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

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

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

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

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

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt

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

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.

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

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

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

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.

Never presume yours is a better morality.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

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

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It's the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.

As long as one suffers one lives.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

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.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

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

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.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

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

As the end of the what is called the 'sexual life' the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

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

The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

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

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

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

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

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

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

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.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

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

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

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.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.

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 . . .

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.

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

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

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

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

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.

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

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

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

All good novelists have bad memories.

Lust is not the worst thing. It is because any day, any time, lust may turn into love that we have to avoid it. And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.

The truth 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.

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.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

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.

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

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.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

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

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.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

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.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

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

You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

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.

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

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

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.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

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

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.

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

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

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

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

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.

Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.