Quotes from Graham Greene

She said, 'I would rather die.' 'Oh,' he said, 'of course. That goes without saying. But we must keep on living.

You've got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all.

She had said, 'We're unlucky. We don't believe in God. So it's no use praying. If we did I could say beads, burn candles—oh, a hundred things. As it is, I can only keep my fingers crossed.

Maybe I'm growing up, Thomas'. But there were tears in his voice, and he looked younger than he had ever done.

If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate?

Human nature too has curious twisted reasons that the heart certainly knows nothing of. It eased the conscience of many small men to feel that they were working for

When I am alone I read – I hide myself in my books. In them I can find the faith of better men than myself

I suppose in all lives a moment comes when we wonder--suppose after all there is a God, suppose the theologians are right.

People can love without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door, and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.

He looked out over the landscape of baking earth and bleak iron huts towards the Scobies' house as though he were examining the scene of a battle after the defeat. He wondered how all that dreary scene would have appeared if he had been victorious, but in human love there is never such a thing as victory: only a few minor tactical successes before the final defeat of death or indifference.

Hatred is in my brain, not in my stomach or my skin. It can't be removed like a rash or an ache. Didn't I hate you as well as love you? And don't I hate myself?

But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination … then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there with me, in me, does he feel safe. If I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps.

Do you think it would be bad for me to have another glass? Vodka has never done anyone any harm.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moments of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

The passenger wondered when it was that he had first begun to detest laughter like a bad smell.

I'd rather be dead or see you dead," I said, "than with another man. I'm not eccentric. That's ordinary human love. Ask anybody. They'd all say the same – if they loved at all.

if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

he distrusted any man who showed so little sign of employment.

I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

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

they were made aware of what it was that kept them safe behind their shop counters, in their walk from fishmonger to grocer: they knew something of the stones, the rope, and the lime ('The executioner was Pierpoint').

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful

I find myself always torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it appears better it is really worse.