Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Perhaps all life was like that – dull and then a heroic flurry at the end.”

— Graham Greene

302. “Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable, and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions; it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.”

— Graham Greene

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “I want ordinary corrupt human love.”

— Graham Greene

313. “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

314. “There are no coroners in Paraguay.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

316. “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

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

— Graham Greene

318. “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

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

— Graham Greene

320. “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

321. “What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.”

— Graham Greene

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Graham Greene

333. “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

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

— Graham Greene

335. “We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design.”

— Graham Greene

336. “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

337. “There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

339. “For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.”

— Graham Greene

340. “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

341. “Human love can be only a pale reflection of the emotion that God must feel for what He has created.”

— Graham Greene

342. “Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round.”

— Graham Greene

343. “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

344. “The Lord is my shepherd.” But if we are sheep why in heaven’s name should we trust our shepherd? He’s going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher.”

— 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. “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

347. “Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now – not desire, but only the reminder of it?”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

350. “Love taught me that your honour did but jest.”

— Graham Greene