Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Graham Greene

English Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright

"Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness."

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age. When the sense of curiosity has withered."

"No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness."

"With the approach of death I care less and less about religion and truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation and darkness."

"It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. "

"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought. "

"When we are not sure, we are alive. "

"Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories."

"We do not choose our concerns."

"The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt."

"A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn’t conceive what it hasn’t experienced."

"A black boy Brought Wilson's gin and I sipped it very slowly Because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but I absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury Accompanied him wherever I went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For I have his public exhibition Wallace. I wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his mustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street."

"A book is like a sandy path which keeps the indent of footprints."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"A man kept his character even when he was insane."

"A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous."

"A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness."

"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.”"

"A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system."

"A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible."

"A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority."

"Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast."

"A treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy."

"All good novelists have bad memories."

"All right. All right.' He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape left, nothing you could touch and say: this is Scobie."

"All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow."

"All, Pyle? Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. Then you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who last until you are through."

"An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in, the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St. Pancras waiting room, Dallow's and Judy's secret lust, and the cold and unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast--whatever it was--got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc--the confession, the penance, and the sacrament--an awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain."

"And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end."

"Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive... He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders. And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of non-existence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will."

"And how is Uncle Edward? Or is he dead? I've reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed."

"And for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness."

"And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love."

"And when we love our sin then we are damned indeed."

"And yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable."

"Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."

"As long as nothing happens anything is possible."

"As long as one suffers one lives."

"Be Disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living... and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent - and never let Either of the two sides know your actual name."

"Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long."

"But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I'd have to love your God. I'd rather love the men you slept with."

"But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and…"

"At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship."

"But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."

"But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came."