Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect – it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.”

— Graham Greene

253. “Doing nothing, badly.”

— Graham Greene

254. “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

255. “The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing-perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves. We were all expendable.”

— Graham Greene

256. “All good novelists have bad memories.”

— Graham Greene

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

263. “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

264. “She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust.”

— Graham Greene

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself.”

— Graham Greene

271. “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

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

— Graham Greene

273. “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

274. “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

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

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

— Graham Greene

278. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— 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. “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

283. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

288. “There are no coroners in Paraguay.”

— Graham Greene

289. “In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

— Graham Greene

290. “Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain – nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.”

— Graham Greene

291. “So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days.”

— Graham Greene

292. “A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.”

— Graham Greene

293. “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

294. “Eternitatea nu este o prelungire a timpului ci o absenta a lui.”

— Graham Greene

295. “Death was far more certain than God.”

— Graham Greene

296. “There was no scene, no tears, just thought – the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

298. “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

299. “He sat heavily down on a tall tubular adjustable chair, which shortened suddenly under his weight and split him on the floor. Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.”

— Graham Greene

300. “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