The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Innocence is a kind of insanity”
“Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. ”
“Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”
“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”
“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”
“That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
“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?”
“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”
“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
“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 possibility of love dying.”
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Book Keywords:
ethics, insanity, relationships, innocent, innocence, philosophy, protection, pragmatism
