When we are not sure, we are alive. - (Greene, Graham - Certainty)

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years. - (Greene, Graham - Children)

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. - (Greene, Graham - Churches)

We mustn't complain too much of being comedians -- it's an honorable 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. - (Greene, Graham - Comedy and Comedians)

Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate. - (Greene, Graham - Communism and Socialism)

I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect -- it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman. - (Greene, Graham - Corruption)

Cynicism is cheap -- you can buy it at any Monoprix store -- it's built into all poor-quality goods. - (Greene, Graham - Cynics and Cynicism)

We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to. - (Greene, Graham - Death and Dying)

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. - (Greene, Graham - Despair)

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning of evolution. - (Greene, Graham - Evolution)

Failure too is a form of death... - (Greene, Graham - Failure)

If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask? - (Greene, Graham - Faith)

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil --or else an absolute ignorance. - (Greene, Graham - Happiness)

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. - (Greene, Graham - Innocence)

His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse. - (Greene, Graham - Jokes and Jokers)