Quotes from Graham Greene

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

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

If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I'm beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.

Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.

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

The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life.

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.

She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to.

What I've done is far worse than murder - that's an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it's over and done, but I'm carrying my corruption around with me. It's the coating of my stomach.' He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. 'Never pretend I haven't shown my love.

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.

It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup. If one were lucky on one day, or cowardly on another, it was presented on a third occasion.

It's not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it's been torn. [...] You can pull a stamp out,' she said with terrible youthful clarity, 'and you don't know that it's ever been there.

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.

And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his, his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy, if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

I am late,' she said, 'I know that I am late. So many little things have to be done when you are alone, and I am not yet accustomed to being alone,' she added with a pretty little sob which reminded me of a cut-glass Victorian tear-bottle. She took off thick winter gloves with a wringing gesture which made me think of handkerchiefs wet with grief, and her hands looked suddenly small and useless and vulnerable.

I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.

it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.

I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about.

But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came.

happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness

I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.

The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?

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.

In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.