Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Major
Redemption
Hate
Ten
Ruined
Firsts
Seemed
Fifteen
First
Committed
Carried
Long
Seven
Fewer
Years
Sin
Test
Clutched
Men
Couldn
Tests
Immeasurably
Love
Majors
Deathbed
Life
Year

More quotes by Graham Greene

Image
He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
Graham Greene
Image
From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.
Graham Greene
Image
I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.
Graham Greene
Image
In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Graham Greene
Image
No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.
Graham Greene
Image
Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
Graham Greene
Image
He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
Graham Greene
Image
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.
Graham Greene
Image
Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.
Graham Greene
Image
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.
Graham Greene
Image
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Graham Greene
Image
The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
Image
So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.
Graham Greene
Image
For a good man fame is always a problem.
Graham Greene
Image
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
Graham Greene
Image
Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together
Graham Greene
Image
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
Image
Most things disappoint till you look deeper.
Graham Greene
Image
Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.
Graham Greene
Image
Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Graham Greene