717 Quotes by Graham Greene

The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam’s apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished.

They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice: they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.

What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?

Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man – or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.

Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal.

Why did you give Querry Deo Gratias?’ ‘He’s cured, but he’s a burnt-out case, and I don’t want to send him away. He can sweep a floor and make a bed without fingers or toes.’ ‘Our visitors are sometimes fastidious.’ ‘I assure you Querry doesn’t mind. In fact he asked for him.

That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.