Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust.”

— Graham Greene

252. “Whew,′ he said, ‘I’m glad that’s over, Thomas. I’ve been feeling awfully bad about it.’ It was only too evident that he no longer did.”

— Graham Greene

253. “You are lovely, brilliant, witty... the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give.”

— Graham Greene

254. “In a common situation, I suppose we all behave much alike and use the same words.”

— Graham Greene

255. “I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.”

— Graham Greene

256. “I could have waited years, now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast; he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn’t move to plead his cause.”

— Graham Greene

257. “If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.”

— Graham Greene

258. “She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers.”

— Graham Greene

259. “It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.”

— Graham Greene

260. “I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.”

— Graham Greene

261. “Doing nothing, badly.”

— Graham Greene

262. “Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,” Aunt Augusta said, “like some people are only bearable under a sheet.”

— Graham Greene

263. “He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn’t done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire... He turned to Rose, ‘I’m off,’ and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn’t murder to escape.”

— Graham Greene

264. “Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.”

— Graham Greene

265. “One has no talent. I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”

— Graham Greene

266. “His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.”

— Graham Greene

267. “All good novelists have bad memories.”

— Graham Greene

268. “I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.”

— Graham Greene

269. “What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.”

— Graham Greene

270. “One can’t always be wise, can one, in a world like this?”

— Graham Greene

271. “What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being?”

— Graham Greene

272. “The Captain turned away from the mirror and said, ‘Thank God, I’m not in danger of prison here. I’m only in danger of death.”

— Graham Greene

273. “You kill a man – that is so easy,’ Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘it needs no skill. You can be certain of what you’ve done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.”

— Graham Greene

274. “Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.”

— Graham Greene

275. “I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.”

— Graham Greene

276. “I couldn’t help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I’ve forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.”

— Graham Greene

277. “I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.”

— Graham Greene

278. “D. felt a little envious of him as he stood there in the yard among the cars – he looked established. Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same a time haunted – by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past.”

— Graham Greene

279. “It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother’s fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more – darkness.”

— Graham Greene

280. “It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin – only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.”

— Graham Greene

281. “What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days – and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.”

— Graham Greene

282. “He opened the book at random, or so he believed, but a book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footsteps.”

— Graham Greene

283. “There are no coroners in Paraguay.”

— Graham Greene

284. “As long as there is a Church, there will be little Torquemadas.”

— Graham Greene

285. “Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.”

— Graham Greene

286. “He disapproved, he didn’t believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn’t lie with a friend’s sister, and ‘decent’ girls were never squiffy.”

— Graham Greene

287. “I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.”

— Graham Greene

288. “With goodness one can feel secure; why wasn’t I satisfied with goodness, why did I always ask her the wrong questions?”

— Graham Greene

289. “Thrillers are like life, more like life than you are.”

— Graham Greene

290. “For a good man fame is always a problem.”

— Graham Greene

291. “God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don’t need admiration, they don’t need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can’t invent a belief.”

— Graham Greene

292. “She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.”

— Graham Greene

293. “Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.”

— Graham Greene

294. “When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an ouverture.”

— Graham Greene

295. “The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?”

— Graham Greene

296. “The old women gossiped as they always had done, squatting on the floor outside the urinoir, carrying Fate in the lines of their faces as others on the palm.”

— Graham Greene

297. “But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I’d have to love your God. I’d rather love the men you slept with.”

— Graham Greene

298. “It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.”

— Graham Greene

299. “The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner – the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.”

— Graham Greene

300. “He had stylized himself – life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.”

— Graham Greene