Graham Greene: Quotes about love

Graham Greene was English writer, playwright and literary critic. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Graham Greene: 328 quotes35 likes

“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 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

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“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.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

“I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?…Like a marriage from which love has gone…And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.”

Graham Greene The Potting Shed

The Potting Shed (1957)

“Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.”

Graham Greene book A Burnt-Out Case

Pt. 1, ch. 1, sct. 2
A Burnt-Out Case (1960)

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 6
The End of the Affair (1951)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)