Quotes from Graham Greene

Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alignments at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll. [p107]

The old women gossiped as they always had done, squatting on the floor outside the urinoir, carrying Fate in the lines of their faces as others on the palm.

She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust.

Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.

The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so I suppose we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman...

Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind - until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.

The lieutenant said, 'Have you seen enough?' speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an ouverture.

I hope they don't repeat our mistake and invent the wheel.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.

It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent

It helped a lot not being able to speak much French. You sound awfully truthful if you don't know the right words.

and sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to. I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.

and the Creole houses were invisible behind the rain.

She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair.

It was my bad luck that she caught me looking at my watch. I heard her voice say, 'I'm sorry. I came by bus and the traffic was bad.' I said, 'The tube's quicker.' 'I know, but I didn't want to be quick.

and won out of her a stiff unused smile.

Memories are a form of simile: when we say something is 'like' we are remembering.

The vultures group themselves on the roof like pigeons: tiny moron head, long necks, faces like Carnival masks, and dusty plumages, peering this and that attentively for death.

For a matter of seconds, he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy--it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty.

Se había puesto de nuevo melancólica. Y por primera vez pensé que quizá las dalias no eran suficiente ocupación para un hombre jubilado.

Presumably she had an idea--women were appallingly practical: they built new plans at once out of the ruins of the old.

The music pealed on under the Chinese lanterns and the pink spotlight featured the singer holding the microphone closer to his starched shirt. 'You been in love?' the Boy asked sharply and uneasily. 'Oh yes,' Rose said. The Boy retorted with sudden venom, 'You would have been. You're green. You don't know what people do.