Graham Greene Quotes

“He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

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

“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

“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.”

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.”

“My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.”

“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.”

“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.”

“God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good.”

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.”

“I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.”

“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

“Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.”

“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…”

“A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.”

“There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost”

“Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises …”

“Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.”

“Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.”

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

“It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”

“I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”

“People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations”

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”

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

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

“We forget very easily what gives us pain.”

“When we are not sure, we are alive.”

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.”

“Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.”

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

“Sooner or later…one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.”

“I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.”

“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”

“It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.”

“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”

“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”

“Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.”

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”

“And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.”

“I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.”

“She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.”

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.”

“You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.”

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year… death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

“Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”

“As long as one suffers one lives.”

“There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.”

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”

“The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.”

“There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”

“If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.”

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”

“A man kept his character even when he was insane.”

“You cannot love without intuition.”

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

“Never presume yours is a better morality.”

“How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.”