Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" Quotes Archives - Famous Inspirational Quotes & Sayings

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.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

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?
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

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.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

You cannot love without intuition.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

Death was far more certain than God.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

Innocence is a kind of insanity
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

One forgets so quickly one's own youth…
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

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.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

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.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

I couldn't resist the temptation to tease Pyle - it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak.
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"

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 . . .
—Graham Greene, "The Quiet American"