Quotes from book
The End of the Affair

Graham Greene

The End of the Affair is a novel by British author Graham Greene, as well as the title of two feature films that were adapted from the novel.

Graham Greene photo

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Variant: Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.
Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“As long as one suffers one lives.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 5, ch. 1
Source: The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“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 book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“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 book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Source: The End of the Affair

Graham Greene photo

“Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

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

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 6
The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

“I sat on my bed and I said to God: You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

“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 belong to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 2, ch. 1
The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

“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 book The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair (1951)

Graham Greene photo

“I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change 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. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 2
The End of the Affair (1951)