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Graham Greene Quotes

Henry Graham Greene , better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers . He was shortlisted, in 1966 and 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world, often through a Catholic perspective.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair; which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel. Several works, such as The Confidential Agent, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Human Factor, and his screenplay for The Third Man, also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage.

Greene was born in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire into a large, influential family that included the owners of the Greene King Brewery. He boarded at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, where his father taught and became headmaster. Unhappy at the school, he attempted suicide several times. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, to study history, where, while an undergraduate, he published his first work in 1925—a poorly received volume of poetry, Babbling April. After graduating, Greene worked first as a private tutor and then as a journalist—first on the Nottingham Journal and then as a sub-editor on The Times. He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, and book and film reviews. His 1937 film review of Wee Willie Winkie , commented on the sexuality of the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple. This provoked Twentieth Century Fox to sue, prompting Greene to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for The Power and the Glory. Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres : thrillers—often with notable philosophic edges—such as The Ministry of Fear; and literary works—on which he thought his literary reputation would rest—such as The Power and the Glory.

Greene had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife, Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life," and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material." William Golding praised Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." He died in 1991, at age 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. October 1904 – 3. April 1991
Graham Greene photo

Works

Brighton Rock
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Brighton Rock
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Graham Greene: 164 quotes35 likes

Famous Graham Greene Quotes

“Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. III, ch. 2, pg 216
The Quiet American (1955)

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 1
Source: The End of the Affair (1951)

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. I, ch. 3, sect. 3
Source: The Quiet American (1955)

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene Quotes about love

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“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.”

Graham Greene

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene Quotes about God

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. I, ch. 1, pg 15
Source: The Quiet American (1955)

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

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Source: Brighton Rock (1938)

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

Graham Greene

Graham Greene: Trending quotes

“We forget very easily what gives us pain.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Source: The Ministry of Fear

“When we are not sure, we are alive.”

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Source: The Ministry of Fear

Graham Greene Quotes

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”

Graham Greene book Ways of Escape

New York Times (January 8, 1981)
Source: Ways of Escape

“Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“Most things disappoint till you look deeper.”

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

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

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

“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…”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

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

Graham Greene

New York Times (October 9, 1985)

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

Graham Greene book Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote (1982)

“Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises …”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

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

Graham Greene book The Human Factor

Pt. III, ch. 3 (1978)
The Human Factor (1978)

“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.”

Graham Greene book Travels with My Aunt

Travels with My Aunt (1969)

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

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Source: The Comedians

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 3, sct. 2
Source: The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations”

Graham Greene

“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.”

Graham Greene

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. IV, ch. 2, pg 230
Source: The Quiet American (1955)

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

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

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“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.”

Graham Greene

Source: Travels With My Aunt

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“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.”

Graham Greene

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

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Pt. I, ch. 1
The Power and the Glory (1940)

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

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

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

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

“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?”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

“As long as one suffers one lives.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 5, ch. 1
Source: The End of the Affair (1951)

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

Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter

Source: The Heart of the Matter

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Variant: Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

Source: The Power and the Glory

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

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Source: The Ministry of Fear

“You cannot love without intuition.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

“Never presume yours is a better morality.”

Graham Greene

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

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