Quotes from Graham Greene

One can't always be wise, can one, in a world like this?

In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m., when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practiced. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older—I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.

He had no accomplice except the credulity of other men.

You said just now that irony was a valuable literary quality. But you aren't a novel, she said.

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy

Nadie puede soportar que no lo perdonen. Ese es el privilegio de Dios.

Innocence must die young if it isn't to kill the souls of men

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

Un hombre sin recuerdos puede llegar a los cien años y sentir que su vida ha sido muy corta.

He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It's the best way, Henry, to win a woman.

Our interests were different, of course - tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both interests of rather lonely people.

The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices—for whose death?

Whims so often end in bankruptcy.

If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.

I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines.

On pouvait être a court de nourriture dans le pays, il y avait toujours de la couleur.

It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings.

It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country.

You can be certain of what you've done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him.

There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.

If you don't see misery you don't believe in it. You can give anyone pain from a distance.