The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

important rather as an elephant is important, from the size of his department; there are some kinds of importance that remain hopelessly damned to unseriousness.

‘Oh, it’s not done,’ I said, ‘but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy’s fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It’s part of modern life. I’ve done most of them myself.’

How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene—the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding towards Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats—one of those bright condemned pre-war summers?

Cophetua complex,

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

There it goes again—the I, I, I, as though this were my story, and not the story of Sarah, Henry, and of course, that third, whom I hated without yet knowing him, or even believing in him.

Boys are born lingerers.’

But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace.

Distrust grows with a lover’s success.

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

‘What did you think?’ ‘That you were her pimp. You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one. The eternal pimp. Why don’t you get angry, Henry?’ ‘I never knew.’ ‘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.’ ‘Why did she leave you?’ ‘Because I became a bore and a fool too. But I wasn’t born one, Henry. You created me. She wouldn’t leave you, so I became a bore, boring her with complaints and jealousy.’

were dead.’ ‘There wasn’t much to pray for then, was there?’ I teased her. ‘Except a miracle.’ ‘When you are hopeless enough,’ she said, ‘you can pray for miracles. They happen, don’t they, to the poor, and I was poor.’

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.

You can’t have a merciful God and this despair.

‘I don’t know. I just wondered.’ ‘I’ve never loved any other woman,’ he said and began to read the evening paper. I couldn’t help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him?

There wouldn’t be much bitterness: it wasn’t as though we were still lovers. Marriage had become friendship, and the friendship after a little could go on the same as before. Suddenly I felt free and happy.

can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend,’

There I go again. I want. I don’t want. If I could love You, I could love Henry. God was made man.

and I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good You are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.

hatred of the safe politicians at home, but the Bible on the desk belonged to another world of thought from mine.

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

of course, he’s got mercy, only it’s such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.

I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now.

Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud. I said, ‘I really ought to be going.’

The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of nonexistence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks,

‘I’ll never lose my faith in coincidence, Henry.’

Cure.’ I tried to summon up all my faith in coincidence, but all I could think of, and that with envy, for I had no relic, was the ruined cheek lying at night on her hair.