Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?"
29 Quotes
"Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?"
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared."
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
"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time."
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight."
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
"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
"-"-A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge."-"If you knew how little you had to revenge..."."
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"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."
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?"
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked."
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember."
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire."
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
"I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing."
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 can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend."
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
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