The End Of The Affair Quotes
"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."
"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."
"We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement—we remember and we foresee and we doubt."
"Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust."
"Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire."
"My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love."
"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil."
"If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it."
"Hatred is very like physical love: it has its crisis and then its periods of calm."
"Poor Sarah, I could think, reading Mr Parkis’s report, for this moment had been the orgasm of my hatred, and now I was satisfied."
"I wanted to put out my hand and touch her, the hair of her head and her secret hair, I wanted her lying beside me."
"Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him forever."
"I’m afraid of the desert. God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything."
"It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery."
"I went upstairs to my room and I began to write to Henry. Darling Henry, I wrote, but that sounded hypocritical."
"I said to God, as I might have said to my father, if I could ever have remembered having one, Dear God, I’m tired."
"If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there."
"I can’t hit him when he’s there and now he’ll always be there because I’ve seen what his misery looks like."
"Would I have hated Maurice for his? I went upstairs and tore up the letter so small nobody could put it together again, and I kicked the suitcase under the bed because I was too tired to start unpacking, and I started writing this down."
"Yesterday I bought a crucifix, a cheap ugly one because I had to do it quickly. I blushed when I asked for it."
"Let me think of those awful spots on Richard’s cheek. Let me see Henry’s face with the tears falling. Let me forget me."
"Dear God, if only you could come down from your Cross for a while and let me get up there instead."
"If I could love a leper’s sores, couldn’t I love the boringness of Henry?"
"I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Just go away. Please, Maurice, have a bit of mercy.’"
"We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves."
"Once and for all. Even though I didn’t know it at the time. I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left."
"It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself."
"I would have shared her now happily with Henry."
"She had lost all our memories forever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself."
"I’m still the same bitch and fake. Clear me out of the way."
"You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain."
"I’m a phoney and a fake, but this isn’t phoney or fake."
"I was glad to get away from that oppressive presence. He had the answers too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a conjuror who bores one by his very skill."
"I haven’t a pencil—or paper. I really can’t be bothered."
"I sat down in the hall. I heard Henry say, ‘Don’t think I’ve got a closed mind, Father Crompton . . .’"
"St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist."
"I don’t mind telling you, Mr Bendrix, that I prayed very hard. I prayed to God and then I prayed to my wife to do what she could."
"You can’t pick and choose in my job, but ever since that first day in Maiden Lane I wished it was any other lady I had the watching of."
"I am writing to you and not Mr Miles being assured of your sympathy due to our close even though sad association."
"The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word."
"I am not worth hating—Maurice Bendrix, author of The Ambitious Host, The Crowned Image, The Grave on the Water-Front. Bendrix the scribbler. Nothing—not even Sarah—is worth our hatred if You exist, except You."
"I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away."
"I had lived for her body and I wanted her body."
"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."