Graham Greene: Trending quotes (page 5)

“love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.”

“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.”

“Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.”

“All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.”

“What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?”

“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”

“[Ida] "…It's a good world if you don't weaken."”

“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 are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.”

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.”

“I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.”

“One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”

“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”

“The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.”

“It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.”

“The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.”

“We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”