Graham Greene Quotes

Young people are fascinated with the idea of love, maybe because they haven't experienced it. The older you get, the more jaded you become with this, like, mystical love thing. It's not as exciting because it's not unknown.

I think the older you get, the more lax you get, and the less romantic you are.

To live in love is life's greatest challenge. It requires more sublety, flexibility, sensitivity, understanding, acceptance, tolerance, knowledge and strength than any other human endeavor.

So, when you have that experienced knowledge you lose the ability to hurt people and you also lose the ability to be hurt by people. That's love.

You could penetrate anybody if you consistently put out love. Some people can't handle it.

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

The wise are wise only because they love.

My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with.

I'm still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think that disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.

Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That's all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.

That many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing.

There was but one thing for him;- to persevere till he got her, or till he had finally lost her. And should the latter be his fate, as he began to fear that it would be, then, he would live, but live only, like a crippled man.

Don't give up on the people you love. Your patient love and faithfulness may be exactly what they need to make a complete turnaround.

If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people." "And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scented water.

nobody ever finds the one

Some feelings are stronger than fear: love, longing, desire.

Many critics speak about coming-of-age love, about initiation, about young libido, and so forth. I've never seen it only this way. We continue to examine things ever so minutely, we interpret obsessively. We may be less bold at 40 than we were at 17, but we're familiar with the road map; we know the bumps in the road; we recognize the sudden turns, the one-way streets, and the dead ends. And we are hurt just the same as when we were teenagers.

Love is not everything ... It is only when we are young that we think it is.

Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

The way I regard those who hurt me today will affect how I experience the world in the future. In any encounter, we have a choice: we can strengthen our resentment or our understanding and empathy. We can widen the gap between ourselves and others or lessen it.

As you get older, you have more and more layers of experience to forgive, more layers of heartbreak, more layers of what you might think of as failure.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?

I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.