Graham Greene citations

Page 2

“Le désespoir est le prix à payer lorsqu'on s'est fixé un but impossible. C'est, dit-on, le péché impardonnable, mais c'est un péché où ne tombent ni l'homme vraiment mauvais, ni le corrompu. Il leur reste toujours l'espoir. Ils n'atteignent jamais le point de congélation où l'on connaît l'échec absolu. Seul, l'homme de bien portera toujours en son cœur ce pouvoir de se damner.”

“Montrez-moi un homme heureux, moi, je vous montrerai la suffisance, l'égoïsme, la malignité… à moins que ce ne soit la totale ignorance.”

“Il fut animé du loyalisme que nous ressentons tous envers le malheur, ce sentiment qui est notre véritable apanage.”

“Les thrillers sont comme la vie - plus comme la vie que vous… c'est ce que nous avons tous fait du monde.”

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.”

“I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.”

“Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.”

“You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other…”

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

“I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.”

“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”

“It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.”

“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”

“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”

“Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.”

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

“And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.”

“I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.”

“She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.”

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.”

“We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.”

“You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.”

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year… death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

“I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.”

“Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”

“As long as one suffers one lives.”

“There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.”

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”

“The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.”

“There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”