Graham Greene Quotes - Page 10

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• I could have waited years, now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast; he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn't move to plead his cause.

  Graham Greene

  Moving, Winning, Men

  5 Copy quote

• Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

  Graham Greene

  Character, Stupidity, Secret

  Graham Greene (1982). “Another Mexico”, Viking Adult

  5 Copy quote

• You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

  Graham Greene

  Mean, Promise, Victory

  Graham Greene (1951). “The heart of the matter”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Form, Standards

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

  Graham Greene

  Beautiful, Children, Home

  Graham Greene (1971). “The Power and the Glory”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Tired, Leave Me Alone, Done

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Giving, Literature

  Graham Greene (1966). “The Comedians”

  8 Copy quote

• We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.

  Graham Greene

  Men, Comedian, Style

  GRAHAM GREENE (1966). “THE COMEDIANS”

  5 Copy quote

• I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: 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 forever.

  Graham Greene

  Prayer, Hate, Tired

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

  5 Copy quote

• ...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.

  Graham Greene

  Onions, Miserable, Individual

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Graham Greene

  Years, Childhood, Forever

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Graham Greene

  Memories, Individuality, Dying

  5 Copy quote

• God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

  Graham Greene

  God, Numbers, Evolution

  Graham Greene (2010). “Travels With My Aunt”, p.246, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

  Graham Greene

  Character, Instinct, Imaginative

  "Getting to Know the General: the Story of an Involvement". Book by Graham Greene, 1984.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Graham Greene

  Men, Trouble, Motive

  Graham Greene (1992). “The Quiet American”

  7 Copy quote

• The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.

  Graham Greene

  Travel, Mean, Gun

  Graham Greene (1982). “Another Mexico”, Viking Adult

  8 Copy quote

• Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

  Graham Greene

  Thinking, Government, People

  6 Copy quote

• Failure too is a form of death.

  Graham Greene

  Death, Failure, Form

  6 Copy quote

• If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.

  Graham Greene

  Long, Curiosity, Ifs

  Graham Greene (1992). “The Quiet American”

  5 Copy quote

• Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream.

  Graham Greene

  Strong, Food, College

  Graham Greene (1966). “The Comedians”

  4 Copy quote

• I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.

  Graham Greene

  Love, Believe, Dying

  Graham Greene (1973). “The Collected Edition: The quiet American”

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Lasts, Firsts

  Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Graham Greene

  Lost Love, Writing, Men

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

  6 Copy quote

• It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

  Graham Greene

  Lying, Believe, Mean

  7 Copy quote

• love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.

  Graham Greene

  Affair, Love Affair, Ends

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

  7 Copy quote

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