Quotes by
Graham Greene |
1904-1991 , British writer
Prolific novelist, playwright, short story writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world.He wrote 25 novels. Several works, such as The Confidential Agent, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Human Factor, and his screenplay for The Third Man, show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage.
| 55 quotes | 2,217 visits |
Quotations
| • | Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. 12 |
| • | There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. 6 |
| • | Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time. 6 |
| • | Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. 4 |
| • | In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! 4 |
| • | Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates. 4 |
| • | It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. 3 |
| • | So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear. 3 |
| • | I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love. 3 |
| • | Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?... Like a marriage from which love has gone… And patience, patience everywhere like a fog. |
| • | The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved. |
| • | Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. |
| • | My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane. |
| • | The world is not black and white. More like black and grey. |
| • | The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him. |
| • | Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline. |
| • | He only felt his loneliness after his third gin. |
| • | He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he’d never played the game. |
| • | Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill. |
| • | Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on. |
| • | But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent. |
| • | We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us. |
| • | Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human. |
| • | In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey. |
| • | There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives. |
| • | 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. |
| • | There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost. |
| • | Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt. |
| • | People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations. |
| • | Destruction after all is a form of creation. |
| • | As long as one suffers one lives. |
| • | In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship. |
| • | Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism. |
| • | When we are not sure, we are alive. |
| • | In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. |
| • | As long as nothing happens, anything is possible. |
| • | He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance. |
| • | There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim. |
| • | I can’t talk you in terms of time –your time and my time are different. |
| • | Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money. |
| • | Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim. |
| • | I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass. |
| • | You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God. |
| • | 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. |
| • | I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist. |
| • | I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing. |
| • | If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask? |
| • | Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings. |
| • | We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts. |
| • | Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel. |
| • | Hate is a lack of imagination. |
| • | I measured love by the extent of my jealousy. |
| • | Most things disappoint till you look deeper. |
| • | Never presume yours is a better morality. |
| • | Love had turned into “love affair” with a beginning and an end. |
