Cameron Patton > Cameron's Quotes

“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Sometimes I get tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. 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.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“As long as one suffers one lives.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Oh, she doesn't belong to anybody now,' he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are all possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice.
The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren't reasonable, are they?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“The problem of pretending to be alive.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for Pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace-he needs it more.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair