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GRAHAM GREENE QUOTES II

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.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American

I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

The argument of danger only applies to those who live in relative safety.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

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

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.

GRAHAM GREENE, Brighton Rock

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

GRAHAM GREENE, Travels with My Aunt

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Comedians

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

GRAHAM GREENE, New York Times, Oct. 9, 1985

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.

GRAHAM GREENE, Monsignor Quixote

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American

In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

GRAHAM GREENE, from journal kept while writing A Burnt-Out Case

In the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.

GRAHAM GREENE, "May We Borrow Your Husband?"

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

GRAHAM GREENE, New York Times, Oct. 9, 1985

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

GRAHAM GREENE, The Ministry of Fear

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

GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

GRAHAM GREENE, Our Man in Havana

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.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American

As long as one suffers one lives.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

GRAHAM GREENE, Sunday Times, Jan. 18, 1981

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear. They sin, but there is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important, there is a difference between not confessing in fact, and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Paris Review, autumn 1953

Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive.... He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders. And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinancy of non-existence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will.

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair

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