Quotes by Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

But Im a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

Beauty is like success: we cant love it for long.

Hes satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you cant be satisfied.

In five hundred years time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

... and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

I couldnt help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but Ive forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.

My second wife - I was still young then - she left me, and I made the mistake of winning her back. It took me years to lose her again after that. She was a good woman. It is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry it is better to marry a bad woman.

Married people grow like each other.

Did you find anything special? Blackie asked.T. nodded. Come over here, he said, and look. Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. Old Miserys savings, he said. Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.What are you going to do? Share them?We arent thieves, T. said. Nobodys going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration. He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. Well burn them, he said, one by one, and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. Id like to see Old Miserys face when we are through, T. said.You hate him a lot? Blackie asked.Of course I dont hate him, T. said. Thered be no fun if I hated him. The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. All this hate and love, he said, its soft, its hooey. Theres only things, Blackie, and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. Ill race you home, Blackie, he said. (The Destructors)

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldnt conceive what it had never experienced

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another persons habitual misery.

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. 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?

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.

Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology. I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.