Quotes from Graham Greene

Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow, Aunt Augusta said, like some people are only bearable under a sheet.

Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.

I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.

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

I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls

Oh, it's not done,' I said, 'but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy's fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It's part of modern life. I've done most of them myself.

The Mayor about the fable of the Prodigal Son: 'But he came home.' 'Yes, his courage failed him. He felt very alone on that pig farm. There was no branch of the Party to which he could look for help. Das Kapital had not yet been written, so he was unable to situate himself in the class struggle. Is it any wonder that he wavered for a time, poor boy?

You'd taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs.