Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.”

— Graham Greene

102. “Marlowe’s devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.”

— Graham Greene

103. “Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.”

— Graham Greene

104. “Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?”

— Graham Greene

105. “They killed him because he was too innocent to live.”

— Graham Greene

106. “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

107. “I’m not involved, not involved,” I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.”

— Graham Greene

108. “Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.”

— Graham Greene

109. “Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. 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 daily possibility of love dying.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

111. “Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”

— Graham Greene

112. “I’m just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls.”

— Graham Greene

113. “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.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

115. “We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.”

— Graham Greene

116. “There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.”

— Graham Greene

117. “It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.”

— Graham Greene

118. “They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

120. “Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”

— Graham Greene

121. “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

122. “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

123. “As long as one suffers one lives.”

— Graham Greene

124. “Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.”

— Graham Greene

125. “This was hell then; it wasn’t anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.”

— Graham Greene

126. “He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.”

— Graham Greene

127. “In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.”

— Graham Greene

128. “You cannot love without intuition.”

— Graham Greene

129. “I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

131. “At one with the One, it didn’t mean a thing besides a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.”

— Graham Greene

132. “Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.”

— Graham Greene

133. “Ordinary life goes on – that has saved many a man’s reason.”

— Graham Greene

134. “That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape – anywhere – for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.”

— Graham Greene

135. “We forget very easily what gives us pain.”

— Graham Greene

136. “To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

138. “The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

— Graham Greene

139. “The problem of pretending to be alive.”

— Graham Greene

140. “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

141. “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

142. “Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.”

— Graham Greene

143. “If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A., I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.”

— Graham Greene

144. “Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love – it’s being unhappy together.”

— Graham Greene

145. “It is the storytellers task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”

— Graham Greene

146. “Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.”

— Graham Greene

147. “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

148. “You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’ 2.”

— Graham Greene

149. “The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.”

— Graham Greene

150. “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.”

— Graham Greene