717 Quotes by Graham Greene

If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures — you had to kill yourself among the graves.

...five years work many changes. At the end of a war all our portraits are out of date: the timid man had been given a gun to slay with, and the brave man had found is nerve fail him in the barrage.

disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.

When you visualized a man or 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.

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.