Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Christmas serves as a time for reflection on our human relationships, acknowledging our failures but also finding comfort in them.
In this quote, Graham Greene expresses the idea that Christmas is more than just a celebration; it is an essential time for introspection and acknowledgment of the imperfect nature of our relationships. While the season may bring feelings of regret regarding our emotional connections and failures with others, it also has a consolatory effect, allowing us to find solace in our shared human experiences and the understanding that we all struggle with relationships.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a holiday gathering, one might share this quote to highlight the importance of reflecting on relationships over the festive season.
More from Graham Greene
All quotes →It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?
God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Similar quotes
You can date whoever you want, but you should marry the nerds and the good guys.
And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.
If I seek to fulfill my own needs at the expense of my partner, we are sure to experience unhappiness, resentment, and conflict. The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both partners to win.
We [should not] make the mistake of thinking that marriage will provide the ultimate satisfaction for which we all hunger. To assume so would be to be guilty of blasphemy. Only God satisfies the hungry heart. Marriage is but one of the channels He uses to enable us to taste how deeply satisfying His thirst-quenching grace can be.
As disabled people, we are taught from a young age that those who are attracted to us are to be regarded with suspicion.
Since we all came from a women, got our name from a women, and our game from a women. I wonder why we take from women, why we rape our women, do we hate our women? I think its time we killed for our women, be real to our women, try to heal our women, cus if we dont we'll have a race of babies that will hate the ladies, who make the babies. And since a man can't make one he has no right to tell a women when and where to create one