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I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.

Graham Greene

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Graham Greene
Age: 86 †
Born: 1904
Born: October 2
Died: 1991
Died: April 3
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire
Henry Graham Greene
Gestures
Committed
Without
Love

More quotes by Graham Greene

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They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
Graham Greene
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Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.
Graham Greene
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O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.
Graham Greene
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We forget very easily what gives us pain.
Graham Greene
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They are always saying God loves us. If thats love Id rather have a bit of kindness.
Graham Greene
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Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long.
Graham Greene
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Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
Graham Greene
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I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.
Graham Greene
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Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... Regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert, sad and dissatisfied brain--nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.
Graham Greene
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I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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It's a good world if you don't weaken.
Graham Greene
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Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
Graham Greene
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In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.
Graham Greene
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It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?
Graham Greene
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I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.
Graham Greene
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There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.
Graham Greene
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Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
Graham Greene
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Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
Graham Greene
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Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?
Graham Greene