Quotes from Graham Greene

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.

he forgot for the while what experience had taught him-that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

You think you are so bad,' she said, 'but it was only because you couldn't bear the pain. But they can bear pain - other people's pain - endlessly. They are the people who don't care.

I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.

Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alignments at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll. [p107]

She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust.

Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind - until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.

It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.

and sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to. I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.

and the Creole houses were invisible behind the rain.

The vultures group themselves on the roof like pigeons: tiny moron head, long necks, faces like Carnival masks, and dusty plumages, peering this and that attentively for death.