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8443934
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Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would..
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Graham Greene |
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f1543a8
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Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
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Graham Greene |
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ba9177e
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All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.
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Graham Greene |
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35f8fff
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We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
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life
resignation
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Graham Greene |
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5be224d
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To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour - the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
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Graham Greene |
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ebc8796
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So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
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Graham Greene |
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88a07eb
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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.
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Graham Greene |
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de72a37
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I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
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love
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Graham Greene |
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3054801
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Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.
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sex
love
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Graham Greene |
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1fe0d95
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There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
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Graham Greene |
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ce1b0ec
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I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah's enemy so much as the enemy of love, and ..
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Graham Greene |
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31e310c
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I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
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Graham Greene |
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0838aff
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O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.
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Graham Greene |
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f4a8366
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He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong.
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Graham Greene |
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cab3663
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It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.
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Graham Greene |
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4da0fe2
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What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.
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romantic
love
philosophy
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Graham Greene |
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36e0296
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Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
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time
pain
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Graham Greene |
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33ecee8
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Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
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hate
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Graham Greene |
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51ba4a3
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In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
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Graham Greene |
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1e88ad3
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He said, 'Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.' This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep.... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.
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Graham Greene |
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a61a0c5
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He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.
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Graham Greene |
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9c0a84e
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Death was far more certain than God.
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Graham Greene |
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648adab
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I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.
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humanism
religion
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Graham Greene |
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5259fe8
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every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.
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monologue
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Graham Greene |
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74eb702
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I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy." You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time." That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all." You'd make my bed for me?" Perhaps."
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Graham Greene |
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e14f2c7
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They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
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Graham Greene |
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4973afa
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Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
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Graham Greene |
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f91a74e
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She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present - she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.
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Graham Greene |
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1f68218
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Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
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Graham Greene |
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4ace37a
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Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
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innocent
innocence
teasing
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Graham Greene |
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182f6d1
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He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
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forgetting
moment
memory
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Graham Greene |
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6426bda
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Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to im..
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Graham Greene |
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7e52341
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It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.
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Graham Greene |
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54dc3ea
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The problem of pretending to be alive.
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Graham Greene |
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7250f9e
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I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
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Graham Greene |
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6ed9651
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She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.
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seriousness
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Graham Greene |
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c52dc2e
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Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
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Graham Greene |
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0381c32
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Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together
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Graham Greene |
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a9f27fc
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now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together.
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Graham Greene |
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713365d
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What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
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Graham Greene |
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9764287
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He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. 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 of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repea..
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Graham Greene |
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47a7e99
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Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
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Graham Greene |
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8a17098
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What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.
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Graham Greene |
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e53748c
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They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
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Graham Greene |