“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“They think my mother's ashes are marijuana.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“I have never planned anything illegal in my life,' Aunt Augusta said. 'How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“People who like quotations love meaningless generalisations.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“The dead of an army become automatically heroes like the dead of the Church become Martyrs.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“In the vision there is no morality”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens's wife and mistress had to suffer so that dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager's money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn't leave a trail of the martyred behind him.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“I think the reason lay partly in his idea of immortality, but I think too it belonged to his war against the Inland Revenue. He was a great believer in delaying tactics. “Never answer all their questions,” he would say. “Make them write again. And be ambiguous. You can always decide what you mean later according to circumstances. The bigger the file the bigger the work. Personnel frequently change. A newcomer has to start looking at the file from the beginning. Office space is limited. In the end it’s easier for them to give in.” Sometimes, if the inspector was pressing very hard, he told me that it was time to fling in a reference to a non-existing letter. He would write sharply, “You seem to have paid no attention to my letter of April 6, 1963.” A whole month might pass before the inspector admitted he could find no trace of it. Mr Pottifer would send in a carbon copy of the letter containing a reference which again the inspector would be unable to trace. If he was a newcomer to the district, of course he blamed his predecessor; otherwise, after a few years of Mr Pottifer, he was quite liable to have a nervous breakdown. I think when Mr Pottifer planned to carry on after death (of course there was no notice in the papers and the funeral was very quiet) he had these delaying tactics in mind. He didn’t think of the inconvenience to his clients, only of the inconvenience to the inspector.’ Aunt Augusta”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, the bank had taught me to be wary of whims.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“La había escuchado con asombro y con cierta inquietud. Por primera vez advertía los peligros que me acechaban. Me sentí como arrastrado tras ella hacia una absurda empresa de caballeros andantes como Sancho Panza tras Don Quijote, sólo que en busca de lo que ella llamaba diversión, en vez de hidalguía.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“A veces pienso que nuestra vida está hecha más por los libros que leemos que por la gente que conocemos: en los libros aprendemos, de segunda mano, qué es el amor y el dolor. Aun cuando tenemos la suerte de enamorarnos es porque nos hemos dejado influir por lo que hemos leído. Si yo no había llegado a conocer el amor, era porque en la biblioteca de mi padre faltaban los libros adecuados.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Quizá el sentido de la moral es la triste compensación que aprendemos a valorar como premio por la buena conducta.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Recordé el reloj con pulsera de oro de la señorita Keene, minúsculo como el de una muñeca, regalo de sir Keene por sus veintiún años. En su pequeña esfera contenía todas las cifras de las horas, como si todas ellas tuviesen la misma importancia y un deber especial que cumplir.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Ojalá pudiera reproducir con más claridad los tonos de su voz. A tía Augusta le gustaba hablar, le gustaba contar historias. Construía las frases con cuidado, como un escritor lento que prevé la fase siguiente y encamina hacia ella su pluma. Nunca dejaba suelta una frase, nunca interrumpía el hilo del relato. En su dicción había algo clásicamente preciso; o quizás sería más exacto decir anticuado. Las expresiones fuera de lo común (y a veces, debo admitirlo, chocantes) brillaban con tanto más resplandor sobre las viejas construcciones.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
“Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Travels With My Aunt
Graham Greene
Born place: in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, The United Kingdom
Born date October 2, 1904
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“I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn’t seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.”
― Luke Rhinehart, quote from The Dice Man
“History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”
― R. Scott Bakker, quote from The Darkness That Comes Before
“Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.”
― Stephen King, quote from Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales
“I saw you first," Jack mumbled.
"You cannot use that as an argument," I rolled my eyes. "I'm not the last piece of pizza. I'm a perso.”
― Amanda Hocking, quote from Flutter
“Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it's worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.”
― Miranda July, quote from No One Belongs Here More Than You
Inner Harbor
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The Whale RiderBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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