Top 400 Graham Greene Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Because I couldn’t bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of her hand.”

— Graham Greene

402. “Registration and cremation, they go together.”

— Graham Greene

403. “You sacrificed both of us once to bring me back to life, but what sort of a life is this without you.”

— Graham Greene

404. “Disbelief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief.”

— Graham Greene

405. “Querry and Doctor Colin sat on the steps of the hospital in the cool of the early day. Every pillar had its shadow and every shadow its crouching patient.”

— Graham Greene

406. “He’s a superior sort of journalist – they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea.”

— Graham Greene

407. “Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride.”

— Graham Greene

408. “Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.”

— Graham Greene

409. “Why do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t time to disguise itself? Nobody here could talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.”

— Graham Greene

410. “When you are hopeless enough,’ she said, ’you can pray for miracles. They happen, don’t they, to the poor, and I was poor.”

— Graham Greene

411. “Curious pedantries moved him.”

— Graham Greene

412. “If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.”

— Graham Greene

413. “Our interests were different, of course – tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both interests of rather lonely people.”

— Graham Greene

414. “That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all.”

— Graham Greene

415. “The wall will find you of its own accords without your help, and every day you live will seem to you a kind of victory.”

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

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

— Graham Greene

418. “Sometimes I would walk 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

419. “Sooner or later,’ Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, ’one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

— Graham Greene

420. “Oh,′ the priest said, ’that’s another thing altogether – God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us – God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

— Graham Greene

421. “It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man’s sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.”

— Graham Greene

422. “Why did you set fire to Earl?’ ‘I was tempted by the devil,’ she said. ‘Milly, please be sensible.’ ‘Saints have been tempted by the devil.’ ‘You are not a saint.’ ‘Exactly. That’s why I fell.”

— Graham Greene

423. “She was too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility.”

— Graham Greene

424. “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

425. “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

426. “If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have a dream of her at night.”

— Graham Greene

427. “The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.”

— Graham Greene

428. “I drive through the streets and I care not a damn, The people they stare, and they ask who I am; And if I should chance to run over a cad, I can pay for the damage if ever so bad. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money.”

— Graham Greene

429. “From behind he looked younger than he was in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips, but when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went.”

— Graham Greene

430. “They don’t want Communism.’ ‘They want enough rice,’ I said. ‘They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”

— Graham Greene

431. “If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.”

— Graham Greene

432. “I loved a man,“she said. “I told you – a man doesn’t alter because you find out more about him. He’s still the same man.”

— Graham Greene

433. “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

434. “He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.”

— Graham Greene

435. “He never listened while his wife talked.”

— Graham Greene

436. “The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.”

— Graham Greene

437. “The supporters of the proletarian revolution have staked their lives on a philosophy. It is the only reason they have for going on with the grim job of living. You cannot accept them to admit even to themselves that Russia has proved them wrong – or Mexico – without the comfort of a dramatic conversion to some other faith. Nobody can endure existence without a philosophy.”

— Graham Greene

438. “Those doubts you have. I can assure you I know them too. But couldn’t we perhaps go over together the philosophical arguments... to help us both?”

— Graham Greene

439. “I’d rather be dead or see you dead,” I said, “than with another man. I’m not eccentric. That’s ordinary human love. Ask anybody. They’d all say the same – if they loved at all.”

— Graham Greene

440. “She had a lot to learn, in the way of books and music and how to dress and talk, but she would never have to learn humanity.”

— Graham Greene

441. “Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”

— Graham Greene

442. “She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn’t living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.”

— Graham Greene

443. “We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.”

— Graham Greene

444. “It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”

— Graham Greene

445. “If one possess a thing securely one need never use it.”

— Graham Greene

446. “Do you never worry about anything?’ ‘I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold. I am interested in life.”

— Graham Greene