Quotes from Graham Greene

Julgava ser possível conceber um qualquer Deus sem relação connosco, bastante vago, amorfo e cósmico, ao qual eu fizera uma promessa e que me retribuíra o prometido - algo que do vago penetrava na vida humana concreta, como um denso vapor deslocando-se por entre as cadeiras e as paredes.

myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

When I looked at him I could see all the delegates sitting there between his ribs and the chief speaker rising and saying, "Freedom is of importance to creative writers." It was very uncanny at breakfast.

At one with the One—it didn't mean a thing beside a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour—the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered.

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.

Excitement is simple: excitement is a situation, a single event. It mustn't be wrapped up in thoughts, similes, metaphors. A simile is a form of reflection, but excitement is of the moment when there is no time to reflect. Action can only be expressed by a subject, a verb and an object, perhaps rhythm -- little else. Even an adjective slows the pace or tranquilizes the nerve.

The ships all go the wrong way.

You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless.

St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.

Do you know that St Matthew mentions Hell fifteen times in fifty-two pages of my bible and St John not once?

Im Leben der meisten Menschen gibt es einen Augenblick, in dem man nicht mehr zurück kann.

Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.

She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present—she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

It felt odd and poetic and encouraging coming back after so many years, a shape imposing itself on life again after chaos.

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. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

I'm still in love, Pyle, and I'm a wasting asset.

She dabbed at her eyes. 'You'd be bored, Henry. An unfinished bottle of champagne found in an old cupboard with all the sparkle gone …' The jaded phrase was worthy of a Haymarket author.

It's not easy to live with someone you've injured.

Perhaps as sects multiply, belief diminishes.

I could feel in my head the cunning of cannabis.

Where?' Milly asked, looking politely up from the Horse-woman's Year Book. It was the evening hour when work was over and the last gold light lay flat across the roofs and touched the honey-coloured hair and the whisky in his glass.

It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.

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?