Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “It’s easier to get over a thing” Scobie said, “if you talk about it.”

— Graham Greene

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Graham Greene

356. “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

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

— Graham Greene

358. “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

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

— Graham Greene

360. “People don’t demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren’t reasonable, are they?”

— Graham Greene

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

366. “One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

368. “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

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

— Graham Greene

370. “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

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

— Graham Greene

372. “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

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

— Graham Greene

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

378. “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

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 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

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.”

— Graham Greene

390. “It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings.”

— Graham Greene

391. “Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.”

— Graham Greene

392. “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

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. “Registration and cremation, they go together.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

396. “The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen enough?’ speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.”

— Graham Greene

397. “You don’t believe in Him, do you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.’ ‘They don’t make sense to me with him.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

399. “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

400. “How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty.”

— Graham Greene