Graham Greene: Trending 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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

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

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

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

“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.”

“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.”