Quotes from Graham Greene

My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.

Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride

What about a Luger ? I suppose you had a Luger. Or an explosive fountain pen ? No. We've never been very James Bond minded here. I wasn't allowed to carry a gun, and my only car was a secondhand Morris Minor.

five years work many changes. At the end of a war all our portraits are out of date: the timid man had been given a gun to slay with, and the brave man had found is nerve fail him in the barrage.

The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust.

Henry added with apparent anxiety, 'You're wet through, Sarah. One day you'll catch your death of cold.' A cliché with its popular wisdom can sometimes fall through a conversation like a note of doom, yet even if we had known he spoke the truth, I wonder if either of us would have felt any genuine anxiety for her break through our nerves, distrust, and hate.

we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and we didn't want a bad conscience.

myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.

You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless.

Do you know that St Matthew mentions Hell fifteen times in fifty-two pages of my bible and St John not once?

Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.