The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.’

I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.

I would have welcomed the open fight if only because there might have been a chance, however small, that through some error of tactics on his side I might have won. And there has never been a time in my life before or since when I have so much wanted to win. I have never had so strong a desire even to write a good book.

He sat there with his damp arm extended, looking away from me. I had never felt less like laughing, and yet I would have liked to laugh if I had been able.

Are husband and wife so much one flesh that if one hates the wife one has to hate the husband too? His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive: so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness, like the man who leaves loose notes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.

She had always called me ‘you’. ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me.

One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance 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:

I felt like a patient and I suppose I was a patient, sick enough to try the famous shock treatment for jealousy.

I noticed that when he shook hands he gave my fingers an odd twist. I think he must have been a freemason, and if I had been able to return the pressure, I would probably have received special terms.

‘Now just tell me everything in your own words,’ he said. I can’t imagine what other words I could have used but my own. I felt embarrassed and bitter: I had not come here for sympathy, but to pay, if I could afford it, for some practical assistance.

Even a doctor is sometimes disconcerted by a patient, but Mr Savage was a specialist who dealt in only one disease of which he knew every symptom.

I don’t know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical.

It was the hour when you make confidences to a stranger.

Love doesn’t take as long as that to work itself out.

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

At the time it seemed to me that if I could have her once more—however quickly and crudely and unsatisfactorily—I would be at peace again: I would have washed her out of my system, and afterwards I would leave her, not she me.

Then I realized that there was nothing wrong any more with the truth. Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

she had a wonderful way of eliminating remorse. Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act.

The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time,

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Hatred is very like physical love: it has its crisis and then its periods of calm.

How easily we believe we can slide out of our guilt by a motion of contrition.

Sometimes it’s easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you’ve made.

When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food. I looked at the hall, clear as a cell, hideous with green paint, and I thought, she wanted me to have a second chance and here it is: the empty life, odourless, antiseptic, the life of a prison, and I accused her as though her prayers had really worked the change: what did I do to you that you had to condemn me to life?

curiosity can be stronger than pain.

Every time I asked him a question I had such hope; it was like opening the shutters of a new house and looking for the view, and every window just faced a blank wall.

I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing. Patronizingly in the end he would place me—probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime—not yet, but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.

I have come to an end of my interest in work now: no one can please me much with praise or hurt me with blame. When I began that novel about the civil servant I was still interested, but when Sarah left me, I recognized my work for what it was—as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years.

Indifference and pride look very much alike,