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The Quiet American QUOTES

The Quiet American QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

3 " Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

4 " So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

5 " 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, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

6 " Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. 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 daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. 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

7 " They killed him because he was too innocent to live. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

8 " It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

9 " Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

10 " Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

11 " Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

12 " One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

13 " Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

14 " Whew,' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

15 " A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

16 " Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

17 " It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

18 " Death was far more certain than God. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

19 " I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American

20 " He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance. "

― Graham Greene , The Quiet American