Quotes from Graham Greene

opio ni siquiera era entonces una droga nociva: el láudano era un sedante nada más. Y empleado por los pudientes, que los pobres no podían costearse. La religión es el válium del pobre, eso es

I want ordinary corrupt human love

I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence.

There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when on finds it.

Registration and cremation, they go together.

There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when one finds it.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

He stumbled on an old boot and put his hand on the stones to save himself: they had all the cold of the sea and had never been warmed by sun under these pillars.

unemployment was not a mark of the lazy man; that the beggar did not beg because he would not work; that had once been the case in the England he knew best, but things were different now.

You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers—if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest's woman. He alone carried a wound, as though a whole world had died.

He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.

You kill a man – that is so easy,' Dr Hasselbacher said, 'it needs no skill. 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. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.

I have never planned anything illegal in my life,' Aunt Augusta said. 'How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?

When you are miserable, you envy other people's happiness.' It wasn't what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Henry was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing.

Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable, and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions; it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.

With goodness one can feel secure; why wasn't I satisfied with goodness, why did I always ask her the wrong questions?

malnutrition is much safer for the rich than starvation. Starvation makes a man desperate. Malnutrition makes him too tired to raise a fist. The Americans understand that well – the aid they give us makes just that amount of difference. Our people do not starve – they wilt.

The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or be possessed without humiliation.

no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness

There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.