Graham Greene Quotes - Page 8

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• Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.

  Graham Greene

  Men, Cinema, Sentimental

  6 Copy quote

• I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

  Graham Greene

  Pain, Drinking, Tired

  4 Copy quote

• Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

  Graham Greene

  Break Up, Breakup, Wine

  GRAHAM GREENE (1966). “THE COMEDIANS”

  11 Copy quote

• He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.

  Graham Greene

  Happiness, Loyalty, Literature

  Graham Greene (1973). “The Portable Graham Greene”

  9 Copy quote

• Doing nothing, badly.

  Graham Greene

  Doing Nothing

  5 Copy quote

• So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

  Graham Greene

  Delay, Life Is, Unhappiness

  7 Copy quote

• I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

  Graham Greene

  Vacancy, Crowded

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

  7 Copy quote

• They haven't left us much to believe, have they? — even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.

  Graham Greene

  Believe, Home, Bigger

  "Triple pursuit: a Graham Greene omnibus".

  5 Copy quote

• Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

  Graham Greene

  Relationship, Communication, Sentimental

  12 Copy quote

• Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

  Graham Greene

  Art, Ducks, Cooking

  Graham Greene (1994). “In Search of a Character: Two African Journals”, Penguin USA

  8 Copy quote

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

  Graham Greene

  Travel, Men, Jet Planes

  5 Copy quote

• I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Play, People

  Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.37, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  6 Copy quote

• Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are all possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.

  Graham Greene

  Hair, Years, Waiting

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.

  Graham Greene

  Literature, Thrillers

  Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The ministry of fear”

  12 Copy quote

• 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?

  Graham Greene

  Passion, Jealous, Hatred

  The End of the Affair ch. 3 (1951)

  13 Copy quote

• I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

  Graham Greene

  Wish, Littles, Might

  Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

  10 Copy quote

• Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

  Graham Greene

  Disappointment, Hate, Selfish

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

• Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

  Graham Greene

  Christmas, Regret, Holiday

  Graham Greene (1980). “Travels with my aunt”

  11 Copy quote

• When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

  Graham Greene

  Hate, Mistake, Believe

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.

  Graham Greene

  Unions, Soviet Union, Soviet

  5 Copy quote

• Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.

  Graham Greene

  Trust, Cities, Insecurity

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  32 Copy quote

• Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

  Graham Greene

  Men, Ordinary, Goes On

  8 Copy quote

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

  Graham Greene

  Animal, Mind, Despair

  Graham Greene (1990). “The power and the glory”, Viking Pr

  8 Copy quote

• Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

  Graham Greene

  Pain, Night, Light

  Graham Greene (1971). “The Power and the Glory”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

  5 Copy quote

• Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

  Graham Greene

  Knowing, People, Heaven

  'The Heart of the Matter' (1948) bk. 1, pt. 1, ch. 5

  6 Copy quote

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