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Graham Greene citations
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Henry Graham Greene, né le 2 octobre 1904 à Berkhamsted, dans le comté de Hertfordshire, en Angleterre, et mort le 3 avril 1991 à Vevey, dans le canton de Vaud, en Suisse, est un écrivain et scénariste britannique. Il a écrit des romans, des nouvelles, des récits de voyages, des essais et des critiques dans lesquels il explore l'ambivalence morale et politique du monde moderne et s'interroge sur le catholicisme.

Il est médaillé de l'Ordre du Mérite, de l'Ordre des compagnons d'honneur, et membre de la Royal Society of Literature. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. octobre 1904 – 3. avril 1991
Graham Greene photo
Graham Greene: 169 citations0 J'aime

Graham Greene citations célèbres

“On pouvait être a court de nourriture dans le pays, il y avait toujours de la couleur.”

Graham Greene livre Les Comédiens

The Comedians

“Le désespoir est le prix à payer lorsqu'on s'est fixé un but impossible. C'est, dit-on, le péché impardonnable, mais c'est un péché où ne tombent ni l'homme vraiment mauvais, ni le corrompu. Il leur reste toujours l'espoir. Ils n'atteignent jamais le point de congélation où l'on connaît l'échec absolu. Seul, l'homme de bien portera toujours en son cœur ce pouvoir de se damner.”

Graham Greene livre Le Fond du problème

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
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Le Fond du problème (1948)

“Montrez-moi un homme heureux, moi, je vous montrerai la suffisance, l'égoïsme, la malignité… à moins que ce ne soit la totale ignorance.”

Graham Greene livre Le Fond du problème

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
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Le Fond du problème (1948)

“Il fut animé du loyalisme que nous ressentons tous envers le malheur, ce sentiment qui est notre véritable apanage.”

Graham Greene livre Le Fond du problème

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that it is where we really belong.
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Le Fond du problème (1948)

Cette traduction est en attente de révision. Est-ce correct?

“Les thrillers sont comme la vie - plus comme la vie que vous… c'est ce que nous avons tous fait du monde.”

Graham Greene

Graham Greene: Citations en anglais

“He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice… He knew the moves, he'd never played the game.”

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Graham Greene livre Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

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

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Graham Greene livre The Ministry of Fear

The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre May We Borrow Your Husband?

May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
Short Stories

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“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.”

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Graham Greene

Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre Les Comédiens

Pt. 1, ch. 4, sct. 3
The Comedians (1966)

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

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Graham Greene livre The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

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

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Graham Greene livre The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 5
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“Under my cloak, a fig for the King!”

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Graham Greene livre Monsignor Quixote

Monsignor Quixote (1982)

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

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Graham Greene livre Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

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

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Graham Greene livre Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“…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.”

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Graham Greene livre Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The End of the Affair

Bk. 2, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“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.”

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Graham Greene

New York Times (October 9, 1985)

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

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Graham Greene livre The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

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

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Graham Greene

&quot;Freedom of Thought,&quot; speech accepting the Jerusalem Prize (6 April 1981) <br class="br"> Excerpted http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/18th-april-1981/19/books in the The Spectator (18 April 1981)

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

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Graham Greene livre The Quiet American

Pt. II, ch. 2, pg 123
The Quiet American (1955)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

“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?”

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Graham Greene livre The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

“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.”

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Graham Greene livre Travels with My Aunt

Pt. 2, ch. 7
Travels with My Aunt (1969)

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