Quotes from Graham Greene

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

Hatred is a failure of imagination.' Graham Greene, 'The Power and the Glory'.

The Lord is my shepherd. But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher.

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.

Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now—not desire, but only the reminder of it?

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.

What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

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.

I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet...He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability

We didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply, and anonymously death came. 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 around at the little I would be leaving.

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

Married people grow like each other.

He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape.

I think I have always liked my fellow men. Liking is a great deal safer than love. It doesn't demand victims. Who is your victim, Querry?

Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.

Don't you believe it. I'll tell you what life is. It's gaol, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows- children being born. It's dying slowly.

I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.' 'Passion?' the doctor smiled. 'I am an Englishman.

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men--he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

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

One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?

Sometimes it's easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you've made.

In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.

Nothing in life was as ugly as death.

There's no such thing as gratitude in politics.