Quotes from Graham Greene

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

As long as one suffers one lives.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

How strange too 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.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.