Quotes from Graham Greene

Letters could lie all right, but they made the lie permanent. They lay as evidence against you: they made you meaner than the spoken word.

If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me, Father, but to me it seems morbid—unmanly even.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.

There's nothing wrong in love. It happens. It doesn't much matter who with. We get caught up, we get kidnapped by mistake.

Nuevos paisajes, nuevas aduanas. La acumulación de recuerdos. Una vida larga no depende de los años. Un hombre sin recuerdos puede llegar a los cien años y sentir que su vida ha sido muy corta.

Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to write about it.' 'Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say,' he replied guardedly. 'And then check it with York?' 'Yes.

In the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled and truth is love.

he carried his body about with him like something he hated.

don't worry. I'm not shocked. I have no politics.

After all, he liked me. That was a claim he could never fail to honour because it astonished him.

What about a Luger ? I suppose you had a Luger. Or an explosive fountain pen ? No. We've never been very James Bond minded here. I wasn't allowed to carry a gun, and my only car was a secondhand Morris Minor.

five years work many changes. At the end of a war all our portraits are out of date: the timid man had been given a gun to slay with, and the brave man had found is nerve fail him in the barrage.

Drop that gun, you fool. This is London.

The job of a reporter is to expose and record.

The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust.

Sar-ah,' he called. 'Sar-ah,' spacing the syllables with an unbearable falsity.

Tacitamente, l'innocenza chiede sempre protezione, quando invece sarebbe molto più saggio se fossimo noi a proteggerci da essa. L'innocenza è come un lebbroso istupidito che ha perso il suo campanello, e che vaga per il mondo senza l'intenzione di far del male a nessuno.

One never knows another human being;

Love is not wrong, but love should be happy and open -- it is only wrong when it is secret, unhappy . . . It can be more unhappy than anything but the loss of God. It is the loss of god. You don't need penance, my child, you have suffered quite enough.

Henry added with apparent anxiety, 'You're wet through, Sarah. One day you'll catch your death of cold.' A cliché with its popular wisdom can sometimes fall through a conversation like a note of doom, yet even if we had known he spoke the truth, I wonder if either of us would have felt any genuine anxiety for her break through our nerves, distrust, and hate.

we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and we didn't want a bad conscience.

All the same you needed to be a little drunk to die.

never again did I see Henry making across the Common after dusk. Perhaps he was ashamed at what he had told me, for he was a very conventional man. I write the adjective with a sneer, and yet if I examine myself I find only admiration and trust for the conventional, like the villages one sees from the high road where the cars pass, looking so peaceful in their thatch and stone, suggesting rest.