Graham Greene: Trending quotes

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Graham Greene: 328 quotes35 likes

“He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice… He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.”

Brighton Rock (1938)

“People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.”

The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.”

Graham Greene book May We Borrow Your Husband?

May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
Short Stories

“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.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

Graham Greene

Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)

“… it was the little things which tripped you up.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“I have often noticed that a bribe…has that effect — it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Pt. 1, ch. 4, sct. 3
The Comedians (1966)

“Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it’s what we’ve all made of the world.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 5
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Under my cloak, a fig for the King!”

Graham Greene book Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote (1982)

“[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Man is made by the places in which he lives…”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“…he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 2, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)