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

More quotes by Graham Greene

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The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.
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The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
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For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.
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The problem of pretending to be alive.
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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.
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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.
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Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.
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In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.
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When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
Graham Greene
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God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.
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Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt
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It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Graham Greene
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Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
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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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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When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
Graham Greene
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We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.
Graham Greene
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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.
Graham Greene
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There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.
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