Travels with My Aunt Quotes

“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

“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

“They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“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?”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“People who like quotations love meaningless generalisations.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“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.”
― Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

“I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens's wife and mistress had to suffer so that dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager's money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn't leave a trail of the martyred behind him.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions— it does not destroy them.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“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.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“One of the few remarks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn't like my father's manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn't have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“As one grows old I think one becomes more attached to family things- to houses and graves.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“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.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, the bank had taught me to be wary of whims.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“I think the reason lay partly in his idea of immortality, but I think too it belonged to his war against the Inland Revenue. He was a great believer in delaying tactics. “Never answer all their questions,” he would say. “Make them write again. And be ambiguous. You can always decide what you mean later according to circumstances. The bigger the file the bigger the work. Personnel frequently change. A newcomer has to start looking at the file from the beginning. Office space is limited. In the end it’s easier for them to give in.” Sometimes, if the inspector was pressing very hard, he told me that it was time to fling in a reference to a non-existing letter. He would write sharply, “You seem to have paid no attention to my letter of April 6, 1963.” A whole month might pass before the inspector admitted he could find no trace of it. Mr Pottifer would send in a carbon copy of the letter containing a reference which again the inspector would be unable to trace. If he was a newcomer to the district, of course he blamed his predecessor; otherwise, after a few years of Mr Pottifer, he was quite liable to have a nervous breakdown. I think when Mr Pottifer planned to carry on after death (of course there was no notice in the papers and the funeral was very quiet) he had these delaying tactics in mind. He didn’t think of the inconvenience to his clients, only of the inconvenience to the inspector.’ Aunt Augusta”
― Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt

“In the vision there is no morality”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“The wall will find you of its own accords without your help, and every day you live will seem to you a kind of victory”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an overture. All the rural and urban themes of our long journey were picked up again: a factory was followed by a meadow, a patch of autostrada by a country road, a gas-works by a modern church: the houses began to tread on each other’s heels, advertisements for Fiat cars swarmed closer together, the conductor who had brought breakfast passed, working intensely down the corridor to rouse some important passenger, the last fields were squeezed out and at last there were only houses, houses, houses, and Milano, flashed the signs, Milano.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“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?”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt

“Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.”
― Graham Greene, Travels with My Aunt