Travels with My Aunt

by Graham Greene

It was understood that I had to wait for the ashes and wait I did, while the chimney of the crematorium gently smoked overhead.

‘Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions—it does not destroy them.’

A long experience with clients has made me prefer a shabby whisky-drinker to a well-dressed beer-drinker.

Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.

‘I have never planned anything illegal in my life,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?’

‘You must surrender yourself first to extravagance,’ my aunt replied. ‘Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza; it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.

It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act.

an author must not be attached to his characters, he must treat them without mercy. In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.

When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can’t go away from them.’

‘I have been happy,’ I said, ‘but I have been so bored for so long.’

‘Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints.’