Frases de Graham Greene

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“Una pasión tiene que tener algo de clandestino, algo de transgresor y algo perverso.”

“Nunca nos acostumbramos a ser menos importantes para los demás de lo que ellos lo son para nosotros.”

“Una historia no tiene comienzo ni fin: arbitrariamente uno elige el momento de la experiencia desde la cual mira hacia atrás o hacia adelante.”

“Nunca convencerás a un ratón de que un gato negro trae buena suerte.”

“Déjate de sermones estúpidos. ¿No te das cuenta de que te quiero?”

“La humanidad avanza gracias no solo a los potentes empujones de sus grandes hombres, sino también a los modestos impulsos de cada hombre responsable.”

“Un hombre sin recuerdos puede llegar a los cien años
y sentir que su vida ha sido muy corta.”

“Se había puesto de nuevo melancólica. Y por primera vez pensé que quizá las dalias no eran suficiente ocupación para un hombre jubilado.”

“Nuevos paisajes, nuevas aduanas. La acumulación de recuerdos. Una vida larga no depende de los años. Un hombre sin recuerdos puede llegar a los cien años y sentir que su vida ha sido muy corta.”

“La anciana se arrodilló y dijo "Ave María"; Ella no creía, pero entre los católicos, incluso los escépticos son corteses.”

“Cuando uno se escapa a un desierto el silencio te grita en los oídos.”

“Quizás haya un profeta también junto al juez en esos tribunales donde se toman nuestras verdaderas decisiones.”

“Nadie puede soportar que no lo perdonen. Ese es el privilegio de Dios.”

“Cómo se puede servir a Dios en un mundo inmoral?”

“El amor no se termina por el solo hecho de que no nos veamos.”

“El odio no es más que carencia de la imaginación.”

“A veces me pregunto cómo se las arreglan los que no escriben, o los que no pintan o componen música, para escapar de la locura, de la melancolía, del terror pánico inherente a la condición humana.”

“Nadie sabe cuánto puede durar un segundo de sufrir.”

“Nuestra pasión es rozar el borde vertiginoso de las cosas. Sigue siendo lo que ha sido siempre: el límite estricto entre lealtad y deslealtad, fidelidad e infidelidad, las contradicciones del alma.”

“Recordé el reloj con pulsera de oro de la señorita Keene, minúsculo como el de una muñeca, regalo de sir Keene por sus veintiún años. En su pequeña esfera contenía todas las cifras de las horas, como si todas ellas tuviesen la misma importancia y un deber especial que cumplir.”

“Ojalá pudiera reproducir con más claridad los tonos de su voz. A tía Augusta le gustaba hablar, le gustaba contar historias. Construía las frases con cuidado, como un escritor lento que prevé la fase siguiente y encamina hacia ella su pluma. Nunca dejaba suelta una frase, nunca interrumpía el hilo del relato. En su dicción había algo clásicamente preciso; o quizás sería más exacto decir anticuado. Las expresiones fuera de lo común (y a veces, debo admitirlo, chocantes) brillaban con tanto más resplandor sobre las viejas construcciones.”

“A veces pienso que nuestra vida está hecha más por los libros que leemos que por la gente que conocemos: en los libros aprendemos, de segunda mano, qué es el amor y el dolor. Aun cuando tenemos la suerte de enamorarnos es porque nos hemos dejado influir por lo que hemos leído. Si yo no había llegado a conocer el amor, era porque en la biblioteca de mi padre faltaban los libros adecuados.”

“Quizá el sentido de la moral es la triste compensación que aprendemos a valorar como premio por la buena conducta.”

“había seguido mis instrucciones al pie de la letra.”

“La había escuchado con asombro y con cierta inquietud. Por primera vez advertía los peligros que me acechaban. Me sentí como arrastrado tras ella hacia una absurda empresa de caballeros andantes como Sancho Panza tras Don Quijote, sólo que en busca de lo que ella llamaba diversión, en vez de hidalguía.”

“Ante mí desfilaban imágenes de praderas que se extendían hasta el agua, de viejos castillos sobre colinas surcadas de viñedos y chicas en bicicleta. Todo parecía limpio, ordenado, seguro, como había sido mi propia vida antes del funeral de mi madre. Recordé mi jardín. Echaba de menos mis dalias.”

“Mientras uno sufre, uno vive.”

“¡Debajo de mi capa, un higo para el rey!”

“Nunca he entendido por qué las personas que pueden tragarse la enorme improbabilidad de un Dios personal se molestan con un Demonio personal.”

“Pienso que la Navidad es una fiesta necesaria; necesitamos un aniversario durante el cual podamos lamentar todas las imperfecciones de nuestras relaciones humanas. Es la fiesta del fracaso, triste pero consoladora.”

“No elegimos nuestras preocupaciones.”

“En un mundo loco siempre parece más sencillo obedecer.”

“La inocencia es una especie de locura”

“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.”