Quotes from Graham Greene

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other...