The Ministry of Fear Quotes

“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

“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

“We forget very easily what gives us pain.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“A man kept his character even when he was insane.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind, until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“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”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“In Gower Street they were sweeping up glass, and a building smoked into the new day like a candle which some late reveler had forgotten to snuff.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice: they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“One can go back to one's own home after a year's absence and immediately the door closes it is as if one had never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain--where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“wasn’t only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“But it wasn’t the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“You think you are so bad,' she said, 'but it was only because you couldn't bear the pain. But "they" can bear pain - other people's pain - endlessly. They are the people who don't care.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind - until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Mr Rennit was angry because he had not been given time to set his scene, and he could so obviously not afford his anger. There was a kind of starved nobility in the self-sacrifice of his rage.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“There was something about a fête which drew Arthur Rowe irresistibly,”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“Have they brought home the haunch?”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“But of course if you believed in God—and the Devil—the thing wasn’t quite so comic. Because the Devil—and God too—had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear