Status Updates From End of the Affair

He said gloomily, 'I don't know what to believe.'

'Nothing. Surely that was the point.'

'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.'

"We were both happy with only ten years and a few counties between us, who were later to come together for no apparent purpose but to give each other so much pain."

"In the picture she looked younger and happier, but not more lovely than in the years I had known her. I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress."

"My hatred could believe in her survival: it was only my love that knew she existed no more than a dead bird."

"I thought; God has more mercy, and then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he's got mercy, only it's such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment."

"What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves."

"For a month or two this year a ghost had pained me with hope, but the ghost was laid and the pain would be over soon. I would die a little more every day, but how I longed to retain it As long as one suffers one lives."

"She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs."