Graham Greene Quotes - Page 2

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.

As long as nothing happens anything is possible.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other.

Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

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

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.

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

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

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

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

This (Vietnam) was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country.

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

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

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.