Quotes from Graham Greene

As long as nothing happens anything is possible...

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.

Death was far more certain than God.

People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren't reasonable, are they?

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

The problem of pretending to be alive.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.

She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps.

He said, 'Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.' This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep.... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace-he needs it more.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth…

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.

One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.