Graham Greene Third Man Quotes & Sayings

I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet ... He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability — Graham Greene

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape
anywhere
for anyone? It was worth murdering a world. — Graham Greene

For a good man fame is always a problem. — Graham Greene

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin
only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it. — Graham Greene

I loved a man,"she said. "I told you - a man doesn't alter because you find out more about him. He's still the same man. — Graham Greene

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition
that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult. — Graham Greene

A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him. — Graham Greene

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God. — Graham Greene

He was feeling happy. It was one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhiliration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (The Power and the Glory) — Graham Greene

The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature — Graham Greene

He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime ... When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire ... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest tinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape. — Graham Greene

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. — Graham Greene

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil
or else an absolute ignorance. — Graham Greene

Perhaps we were looking strained in our manner, because I noticed we had attracted the attention of a little man who sat on a sofa not far off. I tried to outstare him and that was easy. He had a long moustache and fawn-like eyes and he looked hurriedly away: his elbow caught his glass of beer and spun it on to the floor, so that he was overcome with confusion. I was sorry then because it occurred to me that he might have recognized me from my photographs: he might even be one of my few readers. He had a small boy sitting with him, and what a cruel thing it is to humiliate a father in the presence of his son. The boy blushed scarlet when the waiter hurried forward, and his father began to apologize with unnecessary vehemence. — Graham Greene

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused. — Graham Greene

Ordinary life goes on
that has saved many a man's reason. — Graham Greene

God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don't need admiration, they don't need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can't invent a belief. — Graham Greene

I have never met a simple man. Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple. When I was a young priest, I used to try to unravel what motives a man or woman had, what temptations and self-delusions. But I soon learned to give all that up, because there was never a straight answer. No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say, 'Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys. Go in peace. — Graham Greene

It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover. — Graham Greene

Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn't believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right balance, just as Christ had, the legendary figure whom he would have liked to believe in. 'Come unto me all ye that travail are and heavy laden.' Young as the girl was at that August picnic she was heavily laden with her timidity and shame. Perhaps he had merely wanted her to feel that she was loved by someone and so he began to love her himself. It wasn't pity, any more than it had been pity when he fell in love with Sarah pregnant by another man. He was there to right the balance. That was all. — Graham Greene

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

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. — Graham Greene

We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism. — Graham Greene

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there. — Graham Greene

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. — Graham Greene

When you're not a good man yourself you respect a good man. Now I'd prefer to die with a good man around. A good man teaches a lot of nonsense and a bad man teaches truth [...] I'm not the one to teach the boy nonsense. — Graham Greene

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything. — Graham Greene

What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence? — Graham Greene

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed
he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog. — Graham Greene

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. — Graham Greene

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature. — Graham Greene

Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around. — Graham Greene