717 Quotes by Graham Greene

Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.

To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

Cynicism is cheap -- you can buy it at any Monoprix store -- it's built into all poor-quality goods.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

Don't be shy. Put your nose right up to the bunghole.