The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

he was one of misery’s graduates:

He was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.

when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.

‘Should have given him the ’29,’ he breathed in his undimensional voice

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.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future. I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

for once we had hours of time ahead of us and so I squandered it all in a quarrel and there was no love to make.

I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love.

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

‘And they say you’re a first-class chairman. What the hell does our work matter?’ He said sadly, ‘I don’t know anything else that does,’

Massive plot twist...first we hear that she is not alive

‘He’s called Lance, is he?’ ‘After Sir Lancelot, sir. Of the Round Table.’ ‘I’m surprised. That was a rather unpleasant episode, surely.’ ‘He found the Holy Grail,’ Mr Parkis said. ‘That was Galahad. Lancelot was found in bed with Guinevere.’ Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy? Mr Parkis said sadly, looking across at his boy as though he had betrayed him, ‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘Yes, hope,’ Smythe said. ‘Can’t you see what hope there’d be, if everybody in the world knew that there was nothing else but what we have here? No future compensation, rewards, punishments.’ His face had a crazy nobility when one cheek was hidden. ‘Then we’d begin to make this world like heaven.’

Reason for breakup: promise to god

I thought, if only he could convince me that you don’t have to keep a promise to someone you don’t believe in, that miracles don’t happen,

listening to Henry talking to other people, fossilizing under the drip of conversation like that bowler hat in the Cheddar Caves.

If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there’s something to admire.

‘I’m not sure that I don’t believe. But I don’t want to.’

Richard’s right, I thought, we have invented the resurrection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy-tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues. They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen: they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, somebody who wasn’t so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness.

Revealing re her personality that she never knew her father

It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.

She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.