Graham Greene - The End of the Affair (1951)

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To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort.

Graham Greene
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
What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

Graham Greene
In the taxi I let my hand lie on her leg like a promise, but I had no intention of keeping my promise.

Graham Greene
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
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

Graham Greene
Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Graham Greene
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.

Graham Greene
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

Graham Greene
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Graham Greene
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
If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Graham Greene