The Heart of the Matter (Vintage classics)

by Graham Greene

Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

‘One cannot always wait to speak.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price.

Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred. He had no capacity for friendship or for equality.

It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but that was no comfort, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognized his responsibility.

If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?

When it came to strain it was always a man who broke.

He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love.

When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time.’

How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith.

No one can speak a monologue for long alone—another voice will always make itself heard; every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion.