The Quiet American

by Graham Greene

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

‘Fowler,’ he said, ‘I don’t know your Christian name … ?’ ‘Thomas. Why?’ ‘I can call you Tom, can’t I? I feel in a way this has brought us together. Loving the same woman, I mean.’

LOL oh Pyle

Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

Who is the immature cynic now

A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody. But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came, and even opium had its value there.

I knew my appeal was hopeless, but I was not going to reproach myself later for not taking every possible measure.

I understand that

‘A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.’ It sounded like a Caodaist maxim. I began to feel the air of Tanyin was too ethical for me to breathe.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to tease Pyle—it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak. I hadn’t youth, seriousness, integrity, a future.

two men crouched against the wall, watching me. One had a sten gun and one a rifle, but they were as scared as I’d been. They looked like schoolboys, but with the Vietnamese age drops suddenly like the sun—they are boys and then they are old men. I was glad that the colour of my skin and the shape of my eyes were a passport—they wouldn’t shoot now even from fear.

it’s often the good administrators who make it hard to change a bad system.’

voices have a colour too, yellow voices sing and black voices gargle, while ours just speak

Omg

It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings.

‘If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual experience had been, what would you say?’ I knew the answer to that. ‘Lying in bed early one morning and watching a woman in a red dressing-gown brush her hair.’

‘We are fools,’ I said, ‘when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing—I don’t know if she really was, but I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.’

‘When you are in love you want to play the game, that’s all.’ That’s true, I thought, but not as he innocently means it. To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour—the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

I know myself, and I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually. Sometimes this is mistaken by the innocent for unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good—in this case postponement in attending to my hurt—for the sake of a far greater good, a peace of mind when I need think only of myself.

The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.

I was fond of Dominguez. Where other men carry their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden, and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being. All that you encountered in daily contact with him was gentleness and humility and an absolute love of truth: you would have had to be married to him to discover the pride.

Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night. She didn’t change; she cooked for me, she made my pipes, she gently and sweetly laid out her body for my pleasure (but it was no longer a pleasure), and just as in those early days I wanted her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but they were hidden away in a language I couldn’t speak.

‘What’s the good? he’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’

‘He’s a superior sort of journalist—they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea.

‘Sooner or later,’ Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, ‘one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.’