Our Man in Havana Quotes

“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

“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 contained the right books.”
― Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

“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

“They haven't left us much to believe in, have they?--even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“As long as nothing happens anything is possible...”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I've reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us ... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr. Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerning the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“Навлязоха в новия квартал Ведадо, застроен с ниски кремавобели къщи — собственост на богаташи. На колкото по-малко етажи беше къщата, толкова по-богат бе обитателят ѝ. Само един милионер можеше да си позволи да построи бунгало върху площ на цял небостъргач.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana