Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

302. “I hate your reasons. I don’t want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say – pain is a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak... Yes. At the end of a gun.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Graham Greene

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

313. “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

314. “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

315. “I want ordinary corrupt human love.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Graham Greene

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Graham Greene

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Graham Greene

338. “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

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

— Graham Greene

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “A writer doesn’t write for his readers, does he? Yet he has to take elementary precautions all the same, to make them comfortable.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

346. “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

347. “There was not much one could do; he decided at least to be good.”

— Graham Greene

348. “So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

350. “Married people grow like each other.”

— Graham Greene