Graham Greene citations

Page 3

“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.”

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”

“A man kept his character even when he was insane.”

“You cannot love without intuition.”

“What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?”

“If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it.”

“Never presume yours is a better morality.”

“How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.”

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”

“He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

“He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.”

“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”

“We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.”

“In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.”

“A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced”

“God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good.”

“I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.”

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”

“It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.”

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”

“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.”