In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
GRAHAM GREENEIn Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
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.
GRAHAM GREENEWe forget very easily what gives us pain.
GRAHAM GREENEEvery monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.
GRAHAM GREENEIt is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
GRAHAM GREENEHuman nature is not black and white but black and grey.
GRAHAM GREENEEternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
GRAHAM GREENEI aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.
GRAHAM GREENEDespair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
GRAHAM GREENEI had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.
GRAHAM GREENETo 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.
GRAHAM GREENEThere is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
GRAHAM GREENEChampagne, 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.
GRAHAM GREENEYou cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
GRAHAM GREENEBeauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.
GRAHAM GREENEPoint me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.
GRAHAM GREENE