Our Man in Havana Quotes

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You should dream more. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“They haven't left us much to believe in, have they?--even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home or vaguer than a human being.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“As long as nothing happens anything is possible...”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us ... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr. Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerning the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“A romantic is usually afraid in case reality doesn't come up to expectations.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“They had the comfort of not learning from experience.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I've reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“When you feel unable to change your bar you have become old.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“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.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’ 2”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“I said what do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the T.U.C. and British Railways and the Co-op?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“The act of lust and the act of love are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“(Segura) "...surely you realise there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement. ... Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class."
(Wormold) "Who does?"
(Segura) "The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides....”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“He had no accomplice except the credulity of other men.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“He went upstairs and opened the telegram; it was addressed to a department in the British Consulate, and the figures which followed had an ugly look like the lottery tickets that remained unsold on the last day of a draw. There was 2674 and then a string of five-figure numerals: 42811 79145 72312 59200 80947 62533 10605 and so on. It was his first telegram and he noticed that it was addressed from London. He was not even certain (so long ago his lesson seemed) that he could decode it, but he recognised a single group, 59200, which had an abrupt and monitory appearance as though Hawthorne that moment had come accusingly up the stairs. Gloomily he took down Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespeare' - how he had always detested Elia and the essay on Roast Pork. The first group of figures, he remembered, indicated the page, the line and the word with which the coding began. 'Dionysia, the wicked wife of Cleon,' he read, 'met with an end proportionable to her deserts'. He began to decode from 'deserts'. To his surprise something really did emerge. It was rather as though some strange inherited parrot had begun to speak.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“...to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory...”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“He felt the sad relief of a man who realizes that there is one love at least that no longer hurts him.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You can be certain of what you’ve done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana