Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Graham Greene

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Graham Greene

186. “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

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

— Graham Greene

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.”

— Graham Greene

195. “Never presume yours is a better morality.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

198. “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

199. “When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.”

— Graham Greene

200. “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.”

— Graham Greene