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“No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

Life

“The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.”

Graham Greene

New York Times (October 9, 1985)

“Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

Life , God

“Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”

Graham Greene

"Freedom of Thought," speech accepting the Jerusalem Prize (6 April 1981)
Excerpted http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/18th-april-1981/19/books in the The Spectator (18 April 1981)

Freedom

“The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.”

Graham Greene

London Observer (January 2, 1983)

World

“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. II, ch. 2, pg 123
The Quiet American (1955)

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

God , Feeling

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

Love , Peace , Democracy

“If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

Love , Passion , Christ

“I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.”

Graham Greene book Travels with My Aunt

Pt. 2, ch. 7
Travels with My Aunt (1969)

Women

“Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

Death , Fear

“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

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

Life , Fear , Law , Mathematics

“The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.”

Graham Greene

From journal kept while writing A Burnt-Out Case (1959)

Parting , Cooking

“[Priest at Hale's cremation] "…our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

Universe

“Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique…. Catholics and communists have commited great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate…if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Pt. 2, ch. 4, sct. 4
The Comedians (1966)

Faith , Communication , Water , Indifference

“Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.”

Graham Greene

"The Hint of an Explanation" (1948), Twenty-One Stories, 1954
Short Stories

Hate

“What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. IV, ch. 2, pg 242
The Quiet American (1955)

World , Feeling , Decision , Suffering

“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

Graham Greene book Our Man in Havana

Pt. 1, ch. 3, sct. 3
Our Man in Havana (1958)

Pain , Childhood

“Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

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