Graham Greene

“I don't think Communism will work--in the long run--any better than Christianity has done, and I'm not the Crusader type. Capitalism or Communism? Perhaps God is a Capitalist. I want to be on the side most likely to win during my lifetime. Don't look shocked, John. You think I'm a cynic, but I just don't want to waste a lot of time. The side that wins will be able to build the better hospitals, and give more to cancer research--when all this atomic nonsense is abandoned. In the meantime I enjoy the game we're all playing. Enjoy. Only enjoy. I don't pretend to be an enthusiast for God or Marx. Beware of people who believe. They aren't reliable players. All the same one grows to like a good player on the other side of the board--it increases the fun.”

“Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.”

“There are no coroners in Paraguay.”

“El sufrimiento no aumenta por el número: un cuerpo puede contener todo el sufrimiento que puede sentir el mundo.”

“Cuando uno se escapa a un desierto el silencio te grita en los oídos.”

“Cuando somos jóvenes somos una jungla de complicaciones. Nos simplificamos a medida que envejecemos.”

“Quizás haya un profeta también junto al juez en esos tribunales donde se toman nuestras verdaderas decisiones.”

“I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of love. Wouldn't he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn't he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself... into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.”

“I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.”

“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.”

“Sometimes it's easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you've made.”

“A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness.”

“O God, forgive me - I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs - protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them - not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things.”

“That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.”

“The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life.”

“Can't one love or hate", I broke out at him, "as long as that? Don't make any mistake. I'm just another of your jealous clients, I don't claim to be any different fro m the rest,but there's been a time-lag in my case.”

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

“Hatred is a failure of imagination.' Graham Greene, 'The Power and the Glory'.”

“The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.”

“What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?”

“Be Disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living...and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent--and never let either of the two sides know your real name.”

“You try to draw everything into the net of your faith, father, but you can't steal all the virtues. Gentleness isn't Christian, self-sacrifice isn't Christian, charity isn't, remorse isn't. I expect the cavemen wept to see another's tears.”

“I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about.”

“I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there’s a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.”

“One can't reason away regret-it's a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.”

“I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet...He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability”

“The more bare a life is, the more we fear change.”

“I wouldn't like to be cremated', she said.'You'd prefer worms?''Yes, I would.”

“How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.”

“Sometimes I would walk with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.”

“It isn't. when you come to think of it a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything -- so they believe and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.”

“...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.”

“She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.”

“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 for ever.”

“There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.”

“The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.”

“I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.”

“Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”

“When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice.The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.”

“Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles napped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known.”

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

“Married people grow like each other.”

“He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.”

“I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.”

“Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.”

“For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.”

“‎His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room.”

“She was proud of her power of prophecy, though she had not yet lived to see any of her prophecies fulfilled.”

“She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to.”