Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene OM CH, better known by his pen name Graham Greene, was an English novelist and author regarded by some as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers. He was shortlisted, in 1967, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings, which included over 25 novels, he...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 October 1904
Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?
How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.
...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.
O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.
The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other...
So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.
I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.
We'd forgive most things if we knew the facts.
With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
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.