Life & Mortality Quote by Graham Greene

Death, Greene suggests, is the easy bargain: it’s abstract, inevitable, and oddly impersonal. Life is the real scandal. The line flips our presumed dread on its head, and that reversal is pure Greene: a Catholic-tinged novelist of espionage and moral compromise, fascinated less by endings than by the humiliating middle where we have to keep choosing.

The syntax does a lot of the work. “All of us” pretends to comfort, then tightens into accusation. “Resigned” is the key verb: it implies paperwork, surrender, a small, weary signature at the bottom of a form you didn’t draft. We “resign” to death because it requires nothing from us. Life, by contrast, demands a daily consent we’re lousy at granting. Greene’s subtext is that most people don’t fear annihilation as much as they fear endurance: the long, grinding exposure to desire, guilt, responsibility, boredom, temptation, and the awkward fact of other people.

Context matters. Greene wrote out of a 20th century steeped in war, betrayal, and ideological certainty - worlds where death could feel orderly compared to the chaos of living with your decisions. As a playwright (and, more broadly, a dramatist), he understands that conflict isn’t the curtain drop; it’s the scene that won’t end. The quote isn’t morbid so much as diagnostic: we romanticize death because it simplifies the story, while life refuses tidy closure and keeps asking for revisions.