6 Graham Greene Quotes on Emotion

Graham Greene quotes on emotion

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

32. We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us - Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.

41. 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.

42. The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

69. Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

74. Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.