The Heart of the Matter

by Graham Greene

Le pécheur est au cœur même de chrétienté. … Nul n’est aussi compétent que le pécheur en matière de chrétienté. Nul, si ce n’est le saint. PÉGUY

it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.

Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship—pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.

the importance of Perrot was an article of faith with Perrot—doubters would be repelled, persecuted if he had the chance … the faith would never cease to be proclaimed.

‘I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel—tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but—’ he made a gesture which the priest could not see, turned sideways through the grille. ‘I’m not sure that I even believe.’ ‘It’s easy,’ the priest said, ‘to worry too much about that. Especially here. The penance I would give to a lot of people if I could is six months’ leave. The climate gets you down. It’s easy to mistake tiredness for—well, disbelief.’

Inexorably another’s point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

Innocence must die young if it isn’t to kill the souls of men.

When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness.

It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure—the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.