1
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.Graham Greene
2
He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death.Graham Greene
3
We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.Graham Greene
4
One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn't wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?Graham Greene
5
You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.Graham Greene
6
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.Graham Greene
7
Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.Graham Greene
8
Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.Graham Greene
9
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.Graham Greene
10
In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.Graham Greene
11
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.Graham Greene
12
The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being- it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. I human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.Graham Greene
13
I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.Graham Greene
14
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.Graham Greene
15
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aimGraham Greene
16
A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love..' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.Graham Greene
17
Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.Graham Greene