The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love.

‘I suppose—in a way—we’d got to the end of love. There was nothing else we could do together.

‘My dear, my dear. People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’ ‘That’s not our kind of love.’ ‘I sometimes don’t believe there’s any other kind.’

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.

… anything left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had.

But in this bitch and fake where do you find anything to love? Tell me that, God, and I’ll set about robbing you of it for ever.

Every now and then he tried to hurt me and he succeeded because he was really hurting himself, and I can’t bear to watch him hurting himself.

I said to God, as I might have said to my father, if I could ever have remembered having one, Dear God, I’m tired.

I don’t fear poverty. Sometimes it’s easier to cut your coat to fit the cloth than lie on the bed you’ve made.

The habits of his day were still the same and I loved them as one loves an old coat. I felt protected by his habits. I never want strangeness.

Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.

The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known.

I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

For a month or two this year a ghost had pained me with hope, but the ghost was laid and the pain would be over soon. I would die a little more every day, but how I longed to retain it. As long as one suffers one lives.

Sarah and I never drank Chianti and now the act of drinking it reminded me of that fact. I might as well have had our favourite claret, I couldn’t have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

I have no peace and I have no love, except for you, you.