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One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

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
Hands
Life
Human
Learns
Humans
Formed
Book
Beings
Sometimes
Second
Hand
Love
Books
Think
Pain
Thinking

More quotes by Graham Greene

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We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.
Graham Greene
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In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Graham Greene
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My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action.
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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Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men.
Graham Greene
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Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
Graham Greene
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Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
Graham Greene
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I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.
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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Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.
Graham Greene
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I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.' Rose didn't answer the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.
Graham Greene
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Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene
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Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.
Graham Greene
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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Graham Greene
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There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.
Graham Greene
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I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.
Graham Greene
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The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.
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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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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As long as one suffers one lives.
Graham Greene