Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “They think my mother’s ashes are marijuana.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

153. “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

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

— Graham Greene

155. “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

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

— Graham Greene

157. “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

158. “What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

160. “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

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

— Graham Greene

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Graham Greene

168. “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

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

— 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. “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

172. “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

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

— Graham Greene

174. “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

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. “American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter.”

— Graham Greene

177. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

180. “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

181. “It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”

— Graham Greene

182. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Graham Greene

191. “I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”

— Graham Greene

192. “I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn’t exist – mental concepts.”

— Graham Greene

193. “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

194. “Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.”

— Graham Greene

195. “A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced.”

— Graham Greene

196. “The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death?”

— Graham Greene

197. “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

198. “Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.”

— Graham Greene

199. “What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?”

— Graham Greene

200. “A man kept his character even when he was insane.”

— Graham Greene