Graham Greene Quotes - Page 3

Hatred seems to operate on the same glands as love it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

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

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

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

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful

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

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.

Married people grow like each other.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.

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.

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?

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.

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

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?

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

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

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.

Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors")

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

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

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

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.

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

I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

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.

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?

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

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

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.

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

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.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

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

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women's kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.

... and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.

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

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

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

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.

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.

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

When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.