Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “People don’t demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren’t reasonable, are they?”

— Graham Greene

352. “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

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

— Graham Greene

354. “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

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

— Graham Greene

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

360. “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

361. “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

362. “So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.”

— Graham Greene

363. “It is you who are old fashioned with your machine-guns and your gas and your talk of country.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

365. “Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

— Graham Greene

366. “It’s easier to get over a thing” Scobie said, “if you talk about it.”

— Graham Greene

367. “And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I’ve reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.”

— Graham Greene

368. “The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first.”

— Graham Greene

369. “What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.”

— Graham Greene

370. “I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence.”

— Graham Greene

371. “When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.′ It wasn’t what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

— Graham Greene

372. “I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines.”

— Graham Greene

373. “If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate?”

— Graham Greene

374. “One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?”

— Graham Greene

375. “No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.”

— Graham Greene

376. “It’s always the same wherever one goes- it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations.”

— Graham Greene

377. “One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal.”

— Graham Greene

378. “The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam’s apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished.”

— Graham Greene

379. “If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the passion, would we have been able to say, from their actions alone, whether it was the jealous Judas, or the cowardly Peter, who loved Christ.”

— Graham Greene

380. “I could have hated him for saying it: it was like a claim. If you really loved me, I thought, you’d behave like any other injured husband. You’d get angry and your anger would set me free.”

— Graham Greene

381. “But she wouldn’t pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasn’t that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all one’s belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasn’t loading the dice.”

— Graham Greene

382. “A first reading is something special, like first love.”

— Graham Greene

383. “I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.’ ‘Passion?’ the doctor smiled. ‘I am an Englishman.”

— Graham Greene

384. “If you don’t see misery you don’t believe in it. You can give anyone pain from a distance.”

— Graham Greene

385. “It was like hate on a deathbed.”

— Graham Greene

386. “Whims so often end in bankruptcy.”

— Graham Greene

387. “New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.”

— Graham Greene

388. “Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

— Graham Greene

389. “Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on toward the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.”

— Graham Greene

390. “But it wasn’t the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared.”

— Graham Greene

391. “Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man – or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.”

— Graham Greene

392. “He stumbled on an old boot and put his hand on the stones to save himself: they had all the cold of the sea and had never been warmed by sun under these pillars.”

— Graham Greene

393. “Ordinary life goes on – that has saved many a man’s reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, or chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together the personal fear.”

— Graham Greene

394. “If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures – you had to kill yourself among the graves.”

— Graham Greene

395. “Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions – it does not destroy them.”

— Graham Greene

396. “I hope they don’t repeat our mistake and invent the wheel.”

— Graham Greene

397. “He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It’s the best way, Henry, to win a woman.”

— Graham Greene

398. “How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.”

— Graham Greene

399. “Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.”

— Graham Greene

400. “Pain belongs to you as happiness never does.”

— Graham Greene