Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.”

— Graham Greene

153. “I’m sick with life, I’m rotten with health.”

— Graham Greene

154. “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

155. “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

156. “They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice: they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.”

— Graham Greene

157. “The trouble is I don’t believe my unbelief.”

— Graham Greene

158. “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

159. “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.”

— Graham Greene

160. “An artist paints his picture not in a few hours but in all the years of experience before he takes up the brush, and it is the same with failure.”

— Graham Greene

161. “She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. 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

162. “Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.”

— Graham Greene

163. “Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

— Graham Greene

164. “What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.”

— Graham Greene

165. “What will we care for the why and the wherefore?”

— Graham Greene

166. “We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.”

— Graham Greene

167. “You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace-he needs it more.”

— Graham Greene

168. “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

169. “Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

171. “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

— Graham Greene

172. “We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.”

— Graham Greene

173. “I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”

— Graham Greene

174. “It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.”

— Graham Greene

175. “It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield.”

— Graham Greene

176. “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.”

— Graham Greene

177. “They think my mother’s ashes are marijuana.”

— Graham Greene

178. “Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of tragedy.”

— Graham Greene

179. “Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

— Graham Greene

180. “It’s a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.”

— Graham Greene

181. “The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.”

— Graham Greene

182. “Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You’re certain that you possess the Truth – inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T – and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.”

— Graham Greene

183. “As one grows old I think one becomes more attached to family things- to houses and graves.”

— Graham Greene

184. “If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.”

— Graham Greene

185. “My second wife – I was still young then – she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.”

— Graham Greene

186. “I’m afraid of the dark.′ And his mother: ‘Don’t be silly. You know there’s nothing to be afraid in the dark.’ But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it.”

— Graham Greene

187. “They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said, ‘Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.’ He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.”

— Graham Greene

188. “They haven’t left us much to believe in, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.”

— Graham Greene

189. “Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.”

— Graham Greene

190. “I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.”

— Graham Greene

191. “When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.”

— Graham Greene

192. “If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”

— Graham Greene

193. “He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.”

— Graham Greene

194. “Innocence must die young if it isn’t to kill the souls of men.”

— Graham Greene

195. “People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery.”

— Graham Greene

196. “One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.”

— Graham Greene

197. “Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

— Graham Greene

198. “I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

200. “Man made God in his own image, so it’s natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man’s made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It’s his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.”

— Graham Greene