All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
GRAHAM GREENEHer face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.
More Graham Greene Quotes
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We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
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Hate is a lack of imagination.
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The hands of the guilty don’t necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.
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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.
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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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Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.
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Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
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I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.
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There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
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It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.
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Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.
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God save us always,’ I said ‘from the innocent and the good.
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He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
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It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
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A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
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The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
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Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
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There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
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We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.
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People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.
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The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
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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 honor – the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
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Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
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A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
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He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.
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Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.
GRAHAM GREENE