Quotes by Graham Greene

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.

Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.

the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature

Then his friend said, If you fly you will save a day. He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day. I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it form what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spend, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend.

I dont believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

As long as one suffers one lives.

Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.

Why doesnt hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadnt worked.

Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow, Aunt Augusta said, like some people are only bearable under a sheet.

Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers

You dont bless what you love...Its when you want to love and you cant manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I cant love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but thats not always possible.

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.

There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double.

For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you – with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell – can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.