Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Perhaps all life was like that – dull and then a heroic flurry at the end.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

305. “He had no accomplice except the credulity of other men.”

— Graham Greene

306. “And sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to, I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.”

— Graham Greene

307. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

310. “He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.”

— Graham Greene

311. “Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

313. “Knowledge was the great thing – not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.”

— Graham Greene

314. “In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.”

— Graham Greene

315. “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

316. “So one always starts a journey in a strange land – taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all.”

— Graham Greene

317. “I want ordinary corrupt human love.”

— Graham Greene

318. “Sentimentality – that’s what we call the sentiment we don’t share.”

— Graham Greene

319. “Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.”

— Graham Greene

320. “When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.”

— Graham Greene

321. “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

322. “In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.”

— Graham Greene

323. “When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can’t go away from them.”

— Graham Greene

324. “You think you are so bad,′ she said, ‘but it was only because you couldn’t bear the pain. But “they” can bear pain – other people’s pain – endlessly. They are the people who don’t care.”

— Graham Greene

325. “If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.”

— Graham Greene

326. “Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?”

— Graham Greene

327. “He felt the sad relief of a man who realizes that there is one love at least that no longer hurts him.”

— Graham Greene

328. “There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when on finds it.”

— Graham Greene

329. “Henry was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing.”

— Graham Greene

330. “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.”

— Graham Greene

331. “Nadie puede soportar que no lo perdonen. Ese es el privilegio de Dios.”

— Graham Greene

332. “Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour.”

— Graham Greene

333. “She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.”

— Graham Greene

334. “I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

— Graham Greene

335. “That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.”

— Graham Greene

336. “Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind – until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn’t believe in.”

— Graham Greene

337. “It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.”

— Graham Greene

338. “Intimacy with one person could do this-empty the world of friendships, give a distaste for women’s kisses and their bright chatter, make the ordinary world a little unreal and very uninteresting.”

— Graham Greene

339. “I don’t believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.”

— Graham Greene

340. “Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.”

— Graham Greene

341. “Married people grow like each other.”

— Graham Greene

342. “One of the few remarks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another.”

— Graham Greene

343. “Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.”

— Graham Greene

344. “He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.”

— Graham Greene

345. “He wasn’t a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don’t you, with bullets?”

— Graham Greene

346. “I have never met a simple man. Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple. When I was a young priest, I used to try to unravel what motives a man or woman had, what temptations and self-delusions. But I soon learned to give all that up, because there was never a straight answer. No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say, ‘Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys. Go in peace.”

— Graham Greene

347. “That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.”

— Graham Greene

348. “Once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers – if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest’s woman. He alone carried a wound, as though a whole world had died.”

— Graham Greene

349. “He laughed again: the horror of the world lay like infection in his throat.”

— Graham Greene

350. “In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff.”

— Graham Greene