Graham Greene

“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.”

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

“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.”

“He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape.”

“He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.”

“Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.”

“This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.”

“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”

“cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any monoprix store. it's built into all poor-quality goods.”

“A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced”

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

“Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.”

“There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.”

“People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.”

“He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.”

“She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too - by your fingerprints.”

“I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.”

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

“That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. 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.”

“The Minister had a great respect for Pyle - Pyle had taken a good degree in - well, one of those subjects Americans can take degrees in: perhaps public relations or theatrecraft, perhaps even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books).”

“I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.'Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.”

“Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”

“Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.”

“In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.”

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”

“Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.”

“He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.”

“We forget very easily what gives us pain.”

“A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.”

“A man kept his character even when he was insane.”

“The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?”

“Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain--where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.”

“It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.”

“He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.”

“There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.”

“He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind, until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.”

“It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.”

“But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”

“What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom.”

“God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.”

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”

“And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed.”

“I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.”

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”

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

“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.”

“One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.”

“Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.”