Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness – the sense that is where we really belong.”

— Graham Greene

52. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”

— Graham Greene

53. “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

54. “I can’t talk you in terms of time – your time and my time are different.”

— Graham Greene

55. “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.”

— Graham Greene

56. “I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

58. “As long as nothing happens anything is possible...”

— Graham Greene

59. “He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.”

— Graham Greene

60. “I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.”

— Graham Greene

61. “From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.”

— Graham Greene

62. “I had committed myself: without love I’d have to go through the gestures of love.”

— Graham Greene

63. “The hands of the guilty don’t necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.”

— Graham Greene

64. “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

65. “Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.”

— Graham Greene

66. “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

67. “So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth even starting a train of thought.”

— Graham Greene

68. “Failure too is a form of death...”

— Graham Greene

69. “Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.”

— Graham Greene

70. “Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.”

— Graham Greene

71. “Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express.”

— Graham Greene

72. “A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.”

— Graham Greene

73. “You have a sense of humour. I am in favor of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.”

— Graham Greene

74. “St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.”

— Graham Greene

75. “One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.”

— Graham Greene

76. “I recognized my work for what it was – as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?”

— Graham Greene

77. “The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen enough?’ speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.”

— Graham Greene

78. “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

79. “All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”

— Graham Greene

80. “For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation.”

— Graham Greene

81. “So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

— Graham Greene

82. “A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.”

— Graham Greene

83. “Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.”

— Graham Greene

84. “I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”

— Graham Greene

85. “I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

89. “What’s the good? he’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

— Graham Greene

90. “Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.”

— Graham Greene

91. “Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.”

— Graham Greene

92. “My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

94. “Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.”

— Graham Greene

95. “Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.”

— Graham Greene

96. “Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.”

— Graham Greene

97. “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.”

— Graham Greene

98. “Cruel men cry easily at the cinema.”

— Graham Greene

99. “Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.”

— Graham Greene

100. “An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.”

— Graham Greene