Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” Quotes (20 Quotes)

Death was far more certain than God.

Innocence is a kind of insanity

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth…

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

I couldn't resist the temptation to tease Pyle - it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about . . .

I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?

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

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God - a being capable of understanding.

I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.

You cannot love without intuition.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.