717 Quotes by Graham Greene

I was sunk deep in my middle age. All the same I laid my head against her breast. ‘I have been happy,’ I said, ‘but I have seen so bored for so long.

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

There's only things, Blackie.

If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I'm beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for 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.

Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.

I have no belief in luck. I am not superstitious, but it is impossible, when you have reached forty and are conspicuously unsuccessful, not sometimes to half-believe in a malign providence.

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

I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.