Graham Greene Quotes - Page 5

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of 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?

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

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.

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.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

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

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

All good novelists have bad memories.

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

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.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

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.

One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.

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.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.