The Third Man Quotes

“You know what the fellow said – 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 that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence?”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan—it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, "I never quite understand why English people like teas so.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“I'm just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“Nunca nos acostumbramos a ser menos importantes para los demás de lo que ellos lo son para nosotros.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“In the strict sense I would not call him a writer at all." (...) Crabbin said, "He was just a popular entertainer."

"Why the hell not?" Martins said fiercely.

"Oh well, I merely meant..."

"What was Shakespeare?”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“The man who holds the knife is not always the real murderer.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“Human nature too has curious twisted reasons that the heart certainly knows nothing of. It eased the conscience of many small men to feel that they were working for”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“I loved a man," she said. "I told you—a man doesn't alter because you find out more about him. He's still the same man.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“It seemed odd that a man's smell should cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the man himself had become dead matter, a gas, a decay.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man and the Fallen Idol

“a foreigner.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man