Quotes from Graham Greene

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too, but it doesn't talk about love.

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

You cannot love without intuition.

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

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 forever.

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.

A man kept his character even when he was insane.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Never presume yours is a better morality.

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.