"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. "
— Graham Greene

"Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel."
— Graham Greene (The Comedians)

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."
— Graham Greene

"If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. "
— Graham Greene

"I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?"
— Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment)

"I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation."
— Graham Greene

"Most things disappoint till you look deeper."
— Graham Greene

"When we are not sure, we are alive."
— Graham Greene

"I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

--To his mistress, Catherine Walston who inspired The End of the Affair"
— Graham Greene

"I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings."
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"Her 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 Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"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."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."
— Graham Greene

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."
— Graham Greene

"And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed."
— Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory)

"Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. 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 the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"
— Graham Greene

"I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

""Innocence is a kind of insanity""
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. "
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"We forget very easily what gives us pain."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"One can't love humanity. One can only love people."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

"
— Graham Greene

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
— Graham Greene (The Third Man and The Fallen Idol)

"But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not comtained the right books"
— Graham Greene (Travels with My Aunt)

"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."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit."
— Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory)

"I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain."
— Graham Greene

"If I stopped loving Him, I would cease to believe in His love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It's not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don't know how. But I need it, how I need it. "
— Graham Greene

"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil."
— Graham Greene

"So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear."
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human."
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling."
— Graham Greene (Travels with My Aunt)

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
— Graham Greene

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
— Graham Greene

""Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding.""
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever."
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying."
— Graham Greene (The Quiet American)

"One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."
— Graham Greene

"I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass."
— Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory)

"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 (The Heart of the Matter)

"Eternity 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 Greene

"Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love."
— Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory)

"Never presume yours is a better morality."
— Graham Greene

"And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)