Graham Greene (1904 – 1991)
Prolific English novelist, playwright, short story writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world.
The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.
We do not choose our concerns.
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent.
You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the ... appalling ... strangeness of the mercy of God.
We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us — Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are ... it’s what we’ve all made of the world.
I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.
If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
Barbara wrote that his brain frightened her. It was sharp and clear and cruel. She admired him for being always unsentimental, but noted 'always remember to rely on yourself ... if you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you.'
As long as one suffers one lives.
Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
God...created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution.
Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.
"God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good."
No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.
[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'.
Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. 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.