Quotes from Graham Greene

It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

love had turned into love affair with a begining and an end.

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.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

You put the small thief in prison, but the big thief lives in a palace.

Destruction is a form of creation.

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. 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.

We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

She had always called me 'you.' 'Is that you?' on the telephone, 'Can you? Will you? Do you?' so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one 'you' in the world and that was me.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity…

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

People change,' she said 'Oh, no they don't. Look at me. I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.