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Graham Greene Quotes about Hate

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Hate is a lack of imagination.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Graham Greene
Hate, Acceptance, Imagination

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

Graham Greene
Fear, Hate, Response
Graham Greene (1982). “The Collected Edition: The human factor”

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
Graham Greene (1971). “The Power and the Glory”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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

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

Graham Greene
Hate, I Hate You, Hate You

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

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

Graham Greene
Hate, Nests, Ruins
Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.

Graham Greene
Disappointment, Hate, Selfish
Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.

Graham Greene
Running, Hate, Heart
"The Collected Edition: The power and the glory".

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
Hate, Mistake, Believe
Graham Greene (1974). “The end of the affair”, Vintage

I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.

Graham Greene
Prayer, Hate, Tired
Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?

Graham Greene
Hate, Men, Years
Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

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