Quotes from Graham Greene

I had felt myself not merely incapable of love – many are incapable of that, but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world – I saw myself on a great plain, walking and walking on the interminable flats.

God save us always,' I said, 'from the innocent and the good.

We are fools when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing--I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran toward the finish just like a coward runs toward the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.

She was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.

when aeroplanes—strange crates of wood

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

All right. I know I'm behaving badly, and I'm going to go on behaving badly. This is a situation where people do behave badly.

Ordinary life goes on—that has saved many a man's reason.

It would be better if I called you,' she told me, and caution, I thought, caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I remembered again the stair that always - 'always' was the phrase she had used -squeaked.

When you are miserable you envy other people's happiness.

An east wind blew from the City: it had the stone-cold of big business blocks and banks.

If one possess a thing securely one need never use it.

So much of the 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 starting even a train of thought.

My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.

Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride

Dr Hasselbacher never talked in terms of morality; it was outside the province of a doctor.

Didn't he posses in the end the winning cards - the cars of gentleness, humility and trust.

Silence like a plant put out tendrils: it seemed to grow under the door and spread its leaves in the room where I stood.

How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

Sooner or later,' Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, 'one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love, it even produces the same actions.

His heart beat and the band played, and inside the lean experienced skull lay childhood.

Even a happy marriage is a thing of slow growth; love helps to make imperceptible the imprisonment of a man

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding.