Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
—Graham Greene
It is the story-teller’s task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Literature, Books
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Childhood, Youth
Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Media, Journalism
Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Morality, Curiosity, Morals
It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Trust, Feelings
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Despair, Awareness, Expectations, Acceptance, Realization, Realistic Expectations
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.
—Graham Greene
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?
—Graham Greene
Topics: Faith
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
—Graham Greene
Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Maria like dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Religion
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed—that is the meaning of evolution.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Evolution, Meaning
We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Death
Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Appearance
You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?
—Graham Greene
Topics: Difficulty
Failure too is a form of death…
—Graham Greene
Topics: Failure
I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.
—Graham Greene
We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honorable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Comedy
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Enemy
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 person’s habitual misery.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Money, Misery
He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Innocence
When we are not sure, we are alive.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt, Certainty, Ignorance
He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness—the sense that is where we really belong.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Unhappiness, Sadness
We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Determination
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil — or else an absolute ignorance.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Happiness
If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the U. S. A. , I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.
—Graham Greene
A treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy.
—Graham Greene
Topics: Money
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Dodie Smith American Author
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Writer
- J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
- Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
- Agatha Christie British Novelist
- William Shakespeare British Playwright
- V. S. Pritchett British Short Story Writer
- W. Somerset Maugham British Novelist
- Arnold J. Toynbee British Historian
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