Daily Inspiration Quote by Graham Greene

Greene turns a polite aesthetic judgment into a small act of social aggression. “Sentimentality” sounds like a critique of craft - too soft, too easy, too manipulative. But he suggests it’s often just a disguised boundary: an emotional class system where our feelings get labeled authentic and other people’s get demoted to goo.

The line works because it exposes the shame economy around emotion. When we accuse someone of being sentimental, we’re rarely arguing about the feeling itself; we’re policing its legitimacy. The subtext is: your tears don’t count, your nostalgia is cheap, your tenderness is embarrassing. Greene catches how quickly taste becomes morality. We don’t simply dislike your emotion; we indict it as inferior.

There’s a sly, almost clinical irony in his definition. It reads like a dictionary entry, but it’s really a mirror: the judge is the one on trial. The phrase “we don’t share” is the blade. It turns sentimentality from a property of art or speech into a relationship problem - a failure of identification. If I can’t or won’t enter your feeling, I call it sentimental to protect my self-image as discerning, unseduced.

Context matters: Greene wrote in an era that prized restraint and distrusted overt piety, while also living through war and ideological spectacle - perfect conditions for mistrusting public emotion. His Catholic-inflected work often treats sincerity as complicated and costly. This quip doesn’t redeem sentimentality; it indicts our reflex to dismiss it, revealing how “taste” can be a mask for fear of vulnerability.