“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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“Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made--and he had to make a choice--would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end. At that moment, the two Stillmans started on their way again. The first turned right, the second turned left. Quin craved an amoeba's body, wanting to cut himself in half and run off in two directions at once. (Chapter 7)”
― Paul Auster, quote from City of Glass
“So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Nightfall
“Men who have never had to fight love a weapon. They love to hold it in their hands, feel its balance and speculate on the damage they might do, were they called to do it.”
― M.D. Lachlan, quote from Wolfsangel
“I'm not giving up on you. Why would I do that? I love you, Hudson. So much.”
― Laurelin Paige, quote from Found in You
“What the Voortrekkers failed to realize in their moment of victory was that they had offered the covenant to God, not He to them.”
― James A. Michener, quote from The Covenant
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AlkimistBookQuoters 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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