Frases de Graham Greene

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“A nossa vida é mais feita pelos livros que lemos do que pelas pessoas que conhecemos.”

“A próxima melhor coisa para conversar com ela é falar sobre ela.”

“A fama é um afrodisíaco potente.”

“A vingança é salutar ao caráter; dela brota o perdão.”

“Os comunistas têm cometido grandes crimes, mas, pelo menos, não têm ficado à margem, como uma sociedade estabelecida, nem têm sido indiferentes. Eu preferiria ter sangue nas mãos a ter água, como Pilatos.”

“A maioria das pessoas prefere confessar os pecados dos outros.”

“Os historiadores são pessoas que se interessam pelo futuro quando este já é passado.”

“Contra o que é habitual crer, a verdade é quase sempre divertida. A única coisa que as pessoas se dão ao trabalho de inventar são tragédias.”

“Lamentava tê-la envolvido naquilo, mas só o lamentava porque o poderia ter lamentado uma mentira necessária. Reconhecera sempre a necessidade de sacrificar a sua própria integridade; só u m partido que estivesse no poder poderia possuir escrúpulos; escrúpulos de sua parte seriam uma confissão de que ele duvidava do valor supremo de sua causa.”

“Nossas vozes iam ficando cada vez mais altas na escuridão sob a estátua. Como todas as brigas desse tipo, não levou a nada, apenas a uma ferida que sara com facilidade. Há lugar para tantas feridas diferentes antes de percebermos que estamos arrancando uma velha crosta.”

“A idade é muito cansativa e a vida dura demasiado tempo.”

“O comissário de bordo apanhou o último cartão de desembarque e ficou a observar os passageiros que atravessavam o cais cinzento e molhado, sobre uma vastidão de trilhos e sinais, desaparecendo atrás de caminhões abandonados.”

“Ao contrário de Wormold, que não acreditava em nada, Milly era católica: ele tivera de prometer à sua mãe, antes do casamento, que assim seria. Agora a mãe, pensava ele, não tinha fé alguma, mas deixara-lhe uma católica nas mãos.”

“A transitoriedade era a minha pigmentação; minhas raízes jamais penetrariam tão profundamente em qualquer lugar a ponto de me proporcionar um lar ou me fazer sentir seguro como o amor.”

“Desde que ingressara na firma, como um jovem recruta, há mais de trinta anos, Castle sempre almoçava num restaurante atrás da Sr. James´s Street, não muito longe do escritório.”

“Buller estava lambendo as chamadas partes íntimas com o mesmo prazer de um conselheiro municipal a tomar sopa.”

“E ele pôs na vitrola A hard day´s night.”

“Os princípios foram feitos para serem violados. Ser humano é também um dever.”

“Amar, é ver-se como um outro ser nos vê, é estar apaixonado pela nossa imagem deformada e sublimada.”

“Heresia é apenas um outro nome para liberdade de pensamento.”

“Acreditar que um ser não sofre quando os olhos nada exprimem é erro fácil de cometer.”

“Sentimentalismo é como chamamos o sentimento que não compartilhamos.”

“O amor não conhece o que se possa chamar de vitória; apenas alguns pequenos sucessos estratégicos, antes do desastre final da morte ou da indiferença.”

“Preferiria ter sangue nas mãos a ter água como Pôncio Pilatos.”

“O sucesso é mais perigoso do que o fracasso, as ondas quebram ao longo de uma costa mais ampla.”

“[Sobre o personagem de Pinkie] A palavra assassinato não transmitia-o mais do que a palavra 'caixa', 'colar', 'girafa'.”

“I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing.”

“One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.”

“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”

“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”

“The old lady knelt, saying her 'Hail Mary'; She didn't believe — but among Catholics even the sceptical are courteous.”

“It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.”

“The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.”

“We mustn’t complain too much of being comedians—it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed—that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”

“Perhaps his laughter saved them — it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill.”

“You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?”

“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.”

“To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.”

“[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.”

“Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.”

“I suppose the love of life which periodically deserts most men was returning: like sexual desire, it moves in cycles.”

“Its typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps — violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.”

“The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.”

“We do not choose our concerns.”

“God…created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed — that is the meaning of evolution.”

“That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.”

“A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man…. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.”

“[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. …He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:…when all the time it was a country the stranger knew…”

“My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.”

“Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?…Like a marriage from which love has gone…And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.”

“…the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks.”

“Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world’s marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves—it was God’s taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.”

“[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.”

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”