Quotes from Graham Greene

Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

She had so much more capacity for love than I had. I couldn't bring that curtain round the moment, I couldn't forget and I couldn't not fear.

You can have a hundred women and still be a virgin, Pyle. Most of your G.I.s who were hanged for rape in the war were virgins. We don't have so many in Europe. I'm glad. They do a lot of harm.

I didn't bother to ask him why he didn't wait for someone from the American Legation, for I knew the reason. French methods are a little old-fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the conscience, the sense of guilt, a criminal should be confronted with his crime, for he may break down and betray himself. I told myself again I was innocent

The beginning of a book holds more apprehensions for the novelist than the ending. After living with a book for a year or two, he has come to terms with his unconsciousness — the end will be imposed. But if a book is started in the wrong way, it may never be finished.

If only it were possible to love without injury—fidelity isn't enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.

How strange and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger's life, the interest the young mistake for love.

They looked like schoolboys, but with the Vietnamese age drops suddenly like the sun—they are boys and then they are old men.

It wouldn't have done to cable the details of his true career, that before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths

Driven to her hole the small animal peered out at the bright and breezy world; in the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty, fidelity and the love and fear of God, but the small animal had not the knowledge to deny that only in the glare and open world outside was something which people called experience.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation – but I think it is equally true of us all.

It was as if she were accumulating evidence that she had friends like other people.

Was the secret of lasting youth known only to the criminal mind?

There is always that one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. ...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

wasn't only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues.

he recognized the malice which remained alive and kicking in the old man long after discretion had died from a lifetime's neglect.

He never listened while his wife talked.

It's always the same wherever one goes—it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations.

Have they brought home the haunch?

peine forte et dure.

You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

The first colours touched the garden, deep green and then deep red – transience was my pigmentation; my roots would never go deep enough anywhere to make me a home or make me secure with love.

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 ties are worth a thousand truths.