717 Quotes by Graham Greene

He wasn’t a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don’t you, with bullets?

I could have waited years, now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast; he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn’t move to plead his cause.

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Failure too is a form of death.

Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow...like some people are only bearable under a sheet.

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.

They sounded like truth but he rejected them. Comfort can come too easily: he thought, those hands will never hold my fall.

Some lies are just kindness.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it