717 Quotes by Graham Greene

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.

How often the priest had heard the same confession – Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

There’s a virtue in slowness, which we have lost.

He had received already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for, and he was scared.

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.

Perhaps all life was like that – dull and then a heroic flurry at the end.

I’m tired and I’m sick to death of being without you.