Graham Greene
118 quotes
Biography
"They are always saying God loves us. If that's love I'd rather have a bit of kindness."
"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."
"Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing."
"But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"
"I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist."
"Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together."
"You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."
"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance."
"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."
"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."
"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs."
"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil."
"There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief."
"If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it."
"Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair."
"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?"
"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."
"He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied."
"We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to."
"A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced"