Graham Greene

“בחייהם של מרבית האנשים קיימת נקודה שממנה אין דרך חזרה.”

“לסיפור אין התחלה ואין סוף; אנו בוחרים באופן שרירותי את הרגע שבו אנו מסתכלים אחורה, או את זה שבו אנו מתבוננים קדימה.”

“אנשים אינם אוהבים את ההיגיון הפשוט ואת המציאות, עד אשר גילם מאלצם להשלים אִתם.”

“לא ניתן לחיות ללא אמון בזולת, כי משמעו של דבר הוא לשבת בבית הכלא של עצמך.”

“כולנו משלימים עם המוות, אך איש אינו משלים עם החיים.”

“איש אינו מבין את זולתו באמת ובתמים, ואיש אינו יכול לגרום לאושרו של הזולת.”

“הראה נא לי אדם מאושר, ואראה לך אנוכיות, רוע לב ובערות.”

“הייאוש הוא המחיר שאנו משלמים כשאנו מציבים לעצמנו מטרה לא אפשרית.”

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.”

“It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”

“Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.' He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day. I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it form what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spend, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .”

“I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.”

“When there was a choice between love of a woman and hate of a man, her mind could cherish only one emotion, for her love might be a subject for laughter, but no one ever had ever mocked her hatred.”

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”

“They killed him because he was too innocent to live.”