Quotes by Graham Greene

Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarahs child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusaders helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page—Childs Body Found in Wood.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isnt me.

If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

But she wouldnt pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasnt that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all ones belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasnt loading the dice.

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

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality Gods image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

I want men to admire me, but thats a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that theres something to admire.

He couldnt tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

... and then beginning to go back to what you cant even remember.

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.