Quotes from Graham Greene

She said, 'I mean my husband there, Mr Smith – he was Presidential Candidate in 1948. He's an idealist. Of course, for that very reason, he stood no chance.' What could we have been talking about to lead her to that statement?

I suppose the confessional teaches a man to recognize hate.

The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him.

he looked as a man might look who owned the whole world, the whole

You hate him and I suppose I hate him too. But hate-it isn't important. Hate isn't contagious. It doesn't spread. One can hate one man and leave it there. But when you begin to despise like Doctor Fischer, you end by despising all the world.

I was no longer on my dignity.

Even Vacancy was crowded with her.

He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent.

A bedroom without a photograph always seems to indicate a heartless occupant, for one needs the presence of others when one falls asleep.

Rats are highly intelligent creatures. If we find out anything new about the human body we experiment on rats. Rats indeed are ahead of us indisputably in one respect - they live underground. We only began to live underground during the last war. Rats have understood the danger of surface life for thousands of years. When the atom bomb falls the rat will survive.

Philipot was one of the initiates what a triumph that would represent for Papa Doc as he dragged his country down.

I was sunk deep in my middle age. All the same I laid my head against her breast. 'I have been happy,' I said, 'but I have seen so bored for so long.

Love dies, affection and habit win the day.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.' Auden noted: 'Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep.

I would give my life, that's nothing, my soul ... my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are—so important.

somewhere years ago I had forgotten how to be involved in anything. Somehow somewhere I had lost completely the capacity to be concerned.

This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

It was as thought he were on the verge of acceptance into a new country; like a refugee he watched the consul lift his pen to fill in the final details of his via. But the refugee remains apprehensive to the last; he has had too many experiences of the sudden afterthought, the fresh question or requirement, the strange official who comes into the room carrying another file.

It seemed odd that a man's smell should cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the man himself had become dead matter, a gas, a decay.

Those doubts you have I can assure you I know them too. But couldn't we perhaps go over together the philosophical arguments ... to help us both?

penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death.

Oh, go away,' I said. 'Go to your Third Force and York Harding and the Role of Democracy. Go away and play with plastics.' Later I had to admit that he had carried out my instructions to the letter.

Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old...