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”

“People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.”

“At the end of what is called the "sexual life" the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship.”

“But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent.”

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

“… it was the little things which tripped you up.”

“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.”

“Simplicity belonged by right to those who were native-born, those who could take the conditions of life, however bizarre, for granted.”

“Thrillers are like life—more like life than you are … it’s what we’ve all made of the world.”

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

“The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.”

“[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin.”

“Under my cloak, a fig for the King!”

“[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe.”

“Man is made by the places in which he lives…”

“People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time.”

“…he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody.”

“It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.”

“I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”

“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.”

“No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.”

“The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.”

“Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?”

“Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”

“The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.”

“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.”

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.”

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

“If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?”

“I had very good dentures once. Some magnificent gold work. It’s the only form of jewelry a man can wear that women fully appreciate.”