Quotes from book

The End of the Affair

“Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?”

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

“My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.”

“We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.”

“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.”

“I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.”

“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.”

“O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”

“If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.”

“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.”

“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”

“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”

“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.”

“What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?”

“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.”

“You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other…”

“love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.”

“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.”