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The End of the Affair QUOTES

The End of the Affair QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can't love and do nothing. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

3 " I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

4 " What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

5 " I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

6 " The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

7 " disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible; "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

8 " I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry? "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " Married people grow like each other. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " ... and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

18 " As long as one suffers one lives. "

― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair

19 " 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

20 " 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