Graham Greene famous quotes

You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.
-- Graham Greene

#Hate #Hands #Forgive Me

Hate is a lack of imagination.
-- Graham Greene

#Hate #Acceptance #Imagination

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
-- Graham Greene

#Love #Inspirational #Spiritual

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

#Love #Depression #Fear

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.
-- Graham Greene

#Love You #Dark #Smell

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
-- Graham Greene

#Mercy

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.
-- Graham Greene

#Daring

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
-- Graham Greene

#Typewriters #Hands #Two

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
-- Graham Greene

#Thinking #Night #Luxury

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
-- Graham Greene

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

#Truth #Lying #Wine

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
-- Graham Greene

#Mistake #Hate #Believe

If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.
-- Graham Greene

#Hurt #Pain #Philosophy

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?
-- Graham Greene

#Passion #Jealous #Hatred

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
-- Graham Greene

#Glasses #Alcohol #Understanding

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

#Men #People #Execution

Innocence is a kind of insanity
-- Graham Greene

#Insanity #Innocence #Kind

Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination ... then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.
-- Graham Greene

#Revenge #Worry #Charity

I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
-- Graham Greene

#Tired #Sick

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
-- Graham Greene

#Pregnancy #Curiosity #Age

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

#Clothes #Mind #Nails

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
-- Graham Greene

#Happiness #Ignorance #Men

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
-- Graham Greene

#Dumb #Bells #Literature

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
-- Graham Greene

#Success #Congratulations #Break

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
-- Graham Greene

#Children #Dark #Years

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

#Fake People #Distance #Writing

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
-- Graham Greene

#Soul #Narcissism #Satisfied

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
-- Graham Greene

#Brother #Father #Jealous

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
-- Graham Greene

#Looks #Stories #Moments

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity…
-- Graham Greene

#Love #Loyalty #Understanding

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.
-- Graham Greene

#Hands #Taste #Tongue

One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
-- Graham Greene

#People #Humanity #Sociology

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. 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

#Happiness #Pain #Identity

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.
-- Graham Greene

#Fall #Rain #Two

He couldn't 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.
-- Graham Greene

#Memories #Flower #Men

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.
-- Graham Greene

#Falling In Love #Pain #Father

When you visualized a man or a 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.
-- Graham Greene

#Hate #Eye #Men

It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
-- Graham Greene

#Believe #Parent #Strange

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
-- Graham Greene

#Black And White #Human Nature #Grey

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?
-- Graham Greene

#Pain #Writing #Easy

When we are not sure, we are alive.
-- Graham Greene

#Inspirational #Life #Doubt

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
-- Graham Greene

#Christmas #Regret #Holiday

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.
-- Graham Greene

#Chocolate #Mind #Too Much

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.
-- Graham Greene

#Lying #Truth Is #Champagne

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
-- Graham Greene

#Wish #Littles #Might

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.
-- Graham Greene

#Moving #Writing #Air

I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy." You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time." That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all." You'd make my bed for me?" Perhaps.
-- Graham Greene

#Hate #Sleep #Mind

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
-- Graham Greene

#Men #Swings #Discovery