The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.’

But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book—the unconscious worked on it instead, until one morning I woke up and knew, as though I had planned it overnight, that this day I was going to visit Mr Savage.

a detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions.

love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.

The reviewers said it was the work of a craftsman: that was all that was left me of what had been a passion. I thought perhaps with the next novel the passion would return, the excitement would wake again of remembering what one had never consciously known,

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. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

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.

A vapour couldn’t shock you with blood and cries.

had hated You for it and You’d taken my hate like You’d taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh—

There was so much that neither of us understood. Pain was like an inexplicable explosion throwing us together.

I recognized my work for what it was—as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years.

felt like a swimmer who has over-passed his strength and knows the tide is stronger than himself,

It was as though to save her for ourselves we had to destroy her features one by one.

For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you—with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell—can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap.

You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest:

I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

Hatred is in my brain, not in my stomach or my skin. It can’t be removed like a rash or an ache.