Graham Greene

... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember.

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.

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.

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity _ that was a quality God__ 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.

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.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.

In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.

She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.

But she wouldn't pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasn't that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all one's belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasn't loading the dice.

If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing.

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.

He had been frightened and so he had been vehement.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

You are all alike, you people. You never learn the truth--that God knows nothing.