Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

You can__ conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the _ appalling _ strangeness of the mercy of God.

But you do believe, don__ you," Rose implored him, "you think it__ true?" "Of course it__ true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it__ the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don__ know nothing. Of course there__ Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments." "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

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.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

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.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Failure too is a form of death.