717 Quotes by Graham Greene

If you don’t see misery you don’t believe in it. You can give anyone pain from a distance.

I have never planned anything illegal in my life,′ Aunt Augusta said. ‘How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?

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

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed – that is the meaning of evolution.

Once for five minutes seven years ago they had been lovers – if you could give that name to a relationship in which she had never used his baptismal name: to her it was just an incident, a scratch which heals completely in the healthy flesh: she was even proud of having been the priest’s woman. He alone carried a wound, as though a whole world had died.

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn’t know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.

I’m not involved, not involved,” I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.