The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

‘Sarah. Tomorrow’s all right. I’d forgotten something. Same place. Same time,’ and sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to. I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.

Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

‘You pimped with your ignorance. You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look elsewhere. You pimped by giving opportunities … You pimped by being a bore and a fool, so now somebody who isn’t a bore and fool is playing about with her in Cedar Road.’

This is some of the harshest dialogue I’ve ever read

the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the hall from her assignation—‘You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

He doesn’t exist, does he? He can’t exist. You can’t have a merciful God and this despair.

‘Can you explain away love too?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won’t be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive.’

She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast: he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn’t move to plead his cause.

Patronizingly in the end he would place me—probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime—not yet, but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.

prostitutes have a great respect for sentiment.

‘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.’

The priest had said there was nothing we could do that some saint had not done. That might be true of murder and adultery, the spectacular sins, but could a saint ever have been guilty of envy and meanness?