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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.
en
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.
en
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.
en
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

“Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.”

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Graham Greene livre The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”

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Graham Greene livre Les Comédiens

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

“The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.”

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Graham Greene

From journal kept while writing A Burnt-Out Case (1959)

“[Priest at Hale's cremation] "…our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit."”

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Graham Greene livre Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

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Graham Greene livre Our Man in Havana

Pt. 1, ch. 1, sct. 1
Our Man in Havana (1958)

“Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism … is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique…. Catholics and communists have commited great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate…if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”

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Graham Greene livre Les Comédiens

Pt. 2, ch. 4, sct. 4
The Comedians (1966)

“Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed.”

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Graham Greene

"The Hint of an Explanation" (1948), Twenty-One Stories, 1954
Short Stories

“What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.”

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Graham Greene livre The Quiet American

Pt. IV, ch. 2, pg 242
The Quiet American (1955)

“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

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Graham Greene livre Our Man in Havana

Pt. 1, ch. 3, sct. 3
Our Man in Havana (1958)

“Cynicism is cheap—you can buy it at any Monoprix store—it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

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Graham Greene livre Les Comédiens

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

“I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…”

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Graham Greene livre The End of the Affair

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

“[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy.”

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Graham Greene livre Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

“It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.”

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Graham Greene

Speech on receiving the Shakespeare Prize awarded by the University of Hamburg, Germany (1969)

“Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.”

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Graham Greene

Independent (London, April 4, 1991)

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