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.

To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

She had often disconcerted me by the truth.

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.

I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

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

My love and fear acted like conscience. If we had believed in sin, our behaviour would hardly have differed.

it was as though I knew that the only way to hurt her was to hurt myself.

We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: it’s just something to fill the brain with,

I’ve caught belief like a disease.

He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.

‘St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child.’

I put two biscuits by his bed in case he woke and turned the light out.