favourite Graham Greene Quotes
from May We Borrow Your Husband
• At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship. (May We Borrow Your Husband)
• The young man who had been talking about Tenessee Williams rose from his table. He was very tall and thin and he wore a skin-tight black sweater, his msall elegant buttocks were outlined in skin-tight trousers. It was easy to imagine him a degree more naked. Would he have looked at her, she wondered, with interest if she had not been sitting there in the company of a fat old man so horribly clothed? It was unlikely; his body was not designed for women's caress. (Cheap in August)
• There is a man's atmosphere and a woman's atmosphere, and they don't mix except in the proper place, under the sheets. (The Root of All Evil)
from The Ministry of Fear
• Rowe watched them hesitatingly. But it was impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. For more than a year now Rowe had been so imprisoned - there had been no change of cell, no excercise-yerd, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement. A moment comes to a man when a prison-break must be made wahtever the risk. Now cautiously he tried for freedom.
• He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.
• It wasn’t only evil man who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills ... we are trapped and betryed by our virtues.
• A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man - a man who takes either tea or cofee for breakfast, a man who likes a good book and perhaps reads biography rather than fiction, a man who at a regular hour goes to bed, who tries to develop good physical habits but often suffers from constipation, who prefers either dogs or cats and has certain views about politics.
It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
Arthur Rowe was monstrous. His early childhood had been passed before the first world war, and the impressions of childhood are ineffaceable. He was brought up to believe that it was wrong to inflict pain, but he was often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered agonies from a dentist he knew as Mr. Griggs. He learned before he was seven what pain was like - he wouldn’t willingly allow even a rat to suffer it. In childhood we live under the brightness of immorality - heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows 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 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 - of the V.C. in the police-court dock, of the faked income tax return, the sins in corners, and the hollow voice of the man we despised talking to us of courage and purity. The Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognise the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place. The tow great popular statements of faith are ‚What a small world is‘ and ‚I’m a stranger here myself‘.
But Rowe was a murderer - as other men are poets. The statues still stood. He was prepared to do anything to save the innocent or to punish the guilty. He believed against all the experience of life that somewhere there was justice, and justice condemned him. He analysed his motives minutely and allways summed up against himself. He told himself, leaning over the wall, as he had told himself a hundered times, that it was he who had not been able to bear his wife’s pain - and not she.
• The doctor had been too sure of Johns: he had not realised that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police.
• They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occured to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.
from Travels With My Aunt
• I went restlessly out and crossed the little garden where an American couple (from the St James or the Albany) were having tea. One of them was raising a little bag, like a drown animal, from his cup at the and of a cord. At that distressing sight I felt very far away from England <
• When I double-locked the door and followed them, I was left with the sad impression that my aunt might be dead and the most interesting part of my life might be over.
• '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.' (Mr. Visconti)
• 'One collaborates allways with the victorious side. One supports the losing.' (Mr. Visconti)
from The End of the Affair
• Hatred sems to operate the same glans as love: it even produces the same actions.
• Hatred is very like physical love: it has its crisis and then its periods of calm. Poor Sarah, I could think, reading Mr Parkis's report, for this moment had been the orgasm of my hatred, and now I was satisfied.
• I had spent everything I had, and I was lying back with my had on her stomach and her taste - as thin and elusive as water - in my mouth [...]
• It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
• Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall [...]
• She came down with me into the crowded tube and we strap-hung side by side.
• but even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesque of time
• He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.
• 'I'm afraid I've never been able to pray much,' Henry said, 'since I was a boy. I was used to pray to get into the second XV.'
'And did you?'
'I got into the third. I'm afraid that kind of prayer isn't much good, is it, father?'
'Any sort's better than none. It's a recognition of God's power anyway, and that's a kind of praise, I suppose.' I hadn't heard him talk so much since dinner had started.
'I should have thought,' I said, 'it was more like touching wood or avoiding the lines on the pavement. At that age anyway.'
'Oh well,' he said, 'I'm not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world's not everything.' He scowled at me down his nose. 'It could be the beginning of wisdom.'
'Your church certainly goes in for superstition in a big way - St Januarius, bleeding statues, visions of the virgin - that sort of thing.'
'We try to sort them out. And isn't it more sensible to believe that anything my happen than ...?'
<...> I was glad to get away from that oppressive presence. He had the answers down too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a cojuror who bores one by his very skill.
<...> 'Time's a strange thing,' Father Crompton said.
'Of course the child wouldn't understand it was all done in the past.'
'St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don't know that we can understand time any better than a child.'
<...> 'Don't give me your professional pitty, father. Keep it for your penitents.'
'You can't dictate to me whom I'm to pity, Mr Bendrix.'
'Any man could have her.' I longed to believe what I said, for then there would be nothing to miss or regret. I would no longer be tied to her wherever she was. I would be free.
'And you can't teach me anything about penitence, Mr Bendrix. I've had twenty-five years of the Confessional. There's nothing we can do some of the saints haven't done before us.'
'I've got nothing to repent except failure. Go back to your own people, father, back to your bloody little box and your beads.'
'You'll find me there any time you want me.'
'Me want you, father? Father, I don't want to be rude, but I'm no Sarah. No Sarah.'
Henry said with embarrasment, 'I'm sorry, father.'
'You don't need to be. I know when a man's in pain.'
I couldn't get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, 'You're wrong, father. This isn't anything subtle like pain. I'm not in pain, I'm in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.'
'You're a good hater,' Father Crompton said.
Tears stood in my eyes because I was powerless to hurt any of them. 'To hell with the lot of you,' I said.
• For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you - with your lust and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell - can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap. But I won't leap. I sat on my bed and said to God: You've taken her, but You haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's you who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
about the writer
• At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship. (May We Borrow Your Husband)
• The young man who had been talking about Tenessee Williams rose from his table. He was very tall and thin and he wore a skin-tight black sweater, his msall elegant buttocks were outlined in skin-tight trousers. It was easy to imagine him a degree more naked. Would he have looked at her, she wondered, with interest if she had not been sitting there in the company of a fat old man so horribly clothed? It was unlikely; his body was not designed for women's caress. (Cheap in August)
• There is a man's atmosphere and a woman's atmosphere, and they don't mix except in the proper place, under the sheets. (The Root of All Evil)
from The Ministry of Fear
• Rowe watched them hesitatingly. But it was impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. For more than a year now Rowe had been so imprisoned - there had been no change of cell, no excercise-yerd, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement. A moment comes to a man when a prison-break must be made wahtever the risk. Now cautiously he tried for freedom.
• He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it.
• It wasn’t only evil man who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills ... we are trapped and betryed by our virtues.
• A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man - a man who takes either tea or cofee for breakfast, a man who likes a good book and perhaps reads biography rather than fiction, a man who at a regular hour goes to bed, who tries to develop good physical habits but often suffers from constipation, who prefers either dogs or cats and has certain views about politics.
It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
Arthur Rowe was monstrous. His early childhood had been passed before the first world war, and the impressions of childhood are ineffaceable. He was brought up to believe that it was wrong to inflict pain, but he was often ill, his teeth were bad and he suffered agonies from a dentist he knew as Mr. Griggs. He learned before he was seven what pain was like - he wouldn’t willingly allow even a rat to suffer it. In childhood we live under the brightness of immorality - heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows 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 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 - of the V.C. in the police-court dock, of the faked income tax return, the sins in corners, and the hollow voice of the man we despised talking to us of courage and purity. The Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognise the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place. The tow great popular statements of faith are ‚What a small world is‘ and ‚I’m a stranger here myself‘.
But Rowe was a murderer - as other men are poets. The statues still stood. He was prepared to do anything to save the innocent or to punish the guilty. He believed against all the experience of life that somewhere there was justice, and justice condemned him. He analysed his motives minutely and allways summed up against himself. He told himself, leaning over the wall, as he had told himself a hundered times, that it was he who had not been able to bear his wife’s pain - and not she.
• The doctor had been too sure of Johns: he had not realised that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police.
• They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occured to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.
from Travels With My Aunt
• I went restlessly out and crossed the little garden where an American couple (from the St James or the Albany) were having tea. One of them was raising a little bag, like a drown animal, from his cup at the and of a cord. At that distressing sight I felt very far away from England <
• When I double-locked the door and followed them, I was left with the sad impression that my aunt might be dead and the most interesting part of my life might be over.
• '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.' (Mr. Visconti)
• 'One collaborates allways with the victorious side. One supports the losing.' (Mr. Visconti)
from The End of the Affair
• Hatred sems to operate the same glans as love: it even produces the same actions.
• Hatred is very like physical love: it has its crisis and then its periods of calm. Poor Sarah, I could think, reading Mr Parkis's report, for this moment had been the orgasm of my hatred, and now I was satisfied.
• I had spent everything I had, and I was lying back with my had on her stomach and her taste - as thin and elusive as water - in my mouth [...]
• It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
• Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall [...]
• She came down with me into the crowded tube and we strap-hung side by side.
• but even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesque of time
• He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.
• 'I'm afraid I've never been able to pray much,' Henry said, 'since I was a boy. I was used to pray to get into the second XV.'
'And did you?'
'I got into the third. I'm afraid that kind of prayer isn't much good, is it, father?'
'Any sort's better than none. It's a recognition of God's power anyway, and that's a kind of praise, I suppose.' I hadn't heard him talk so much since dinner had started.
'I should have thought,' I said, 'it was more like touching wood or avoiding the lines on the pavement. At that age anyway.'
'Oh well,' he said, 'I'm not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world's not everything.' He scowled at me down his nose. 'It could be the beginning of wisdom.'
'Your church certainly goes in for superstition in a big way - St Januarius, bleeding statues, visions of the virgin - that sort of thing.'
'We try to sort them out. And isn't it more sensible to believe that anything my happen than ...?'
<...> I was glad to get away from that oppressive presence. He had the answers down too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a cojuror who bores one by his very skill.
<...> 'Time's a strange thing,' Father Crompton said.
'Of course the child wouldn't understand it was all done in the past.'
'St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don't know that we can understand time any better than a child.'
<...> 'Don't give me your professional pitty, father. Keep it for your penitents.'
'You can't dictate to me whom I'm to pity, Mr Bendrix.'
'Any man could have her.' I longed to believe what I said, for then there would be nothing to miss or regret. I would no longer be tied to her wherever she was. I would be free.
'And you can't teach me anything about penitence, Mr Bendrix. I've had twenty-five years of the Confessional. There's nothing we can do some of the saints haven't done before us.'
'I've got nothing to repent except failure. Go back to your own people, father, back to your bloody little box and your beads.'
'You'll find me there any time you want me.'
'Me want you, father? Father, I don't want to be rude, but I'm no Sarah. No Sarah.'
Henry said with embarrasment, 'I'm sorry, father.'
'You don't need to be. I know when a man's in pain.'
I couldn't get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, 'You're wrong, father. This isn't anything subtle like pain. I'm not in pain, I'm in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.'
'You're a good hater,' Father Crompton said.
Tears stood in my eyes because I was powerless to hurt any of them. 'To hell with the lot of you,' I said.
• For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you - with your lust and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell - can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap. But I won't leap. I sat on my bed and said to God: You've taken her, but You haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's you who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
about the writer