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Graham Greene Quotes about Memories

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All good novelists have bad memories.

All good novelists have bad memories.

Graham Greene
Memories, Novelists, Bad Memories

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.

Graham Greene
Pain, Memories, Men
Graham Greene (1970). “The Collected Edition: Our man in Havana”

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

Graham Greene
Memories, Imagination, Novelists

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
Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

Graham Greene
Running, Memories, Book
"The Ministry of Fear". Book by Graham Greene. Book 1, Chapter 7, Section 1, 1943.

To comfort me is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

Graham Greene
Lonely, Memories, Comfort
Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

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.

Graham Greene
Memories, Individuality, Dying

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