Quotes by Graham Greene

You must promise me. You cant desire the end without desiring the means.Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

I know one thing you dont. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didnt teach you that at school.Rose didnt answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

But you do believe, don’t you, Rose implored him, you think it’s true? Of course it’s true, the Boy said. What else could there be? he went scornfully on. Why, he said, it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation, he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, torments. And Heaven too, Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. Oh, maybe, the Boy said, maybe.

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

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.

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isnt being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--its being unhappy together.

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

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

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

Wouldnt we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps thats why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

I cant talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

Theres nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless its bricks.

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.

It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brothers fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.