Ariyah > Ariyah's Quotes

“Just keep her laughing,” Doug said. “When a woman laughs, her eyes are closed more. She won’t notice how ugly you are.”
― Abby Jimenez, Part of Your World

“I love you,” he whispered. “We are together. This isn’t over. And even if you leave, it won’t be over because you’ll take the love with you and it’ll bring you back.”
― Abby Jimenez, Part of Your World

“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

“I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. 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.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“You needn't be so scared. Love doesn't end. Just because we don't see each other...”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If I'm a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I’m not at peace anymore. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want anymore pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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

“The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“As long as one suffers one lives.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“When I tried to remember her voice saying, 'Don't worry,' I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice.
The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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

“I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah's enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn't' that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn't he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn't he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? 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.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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

“People don't demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren't reasonable, are they?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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, The End of the Affair

“...now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don't need admiration, they don't need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can't invent a belief.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Can you explain away love too?' I asked.
'Oh yes,' he said. 'The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won't be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“...and yet could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn't, of course, simply the onions -- it was the sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“It isn't. when you come to think of it a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren't lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, 'as long as no one but myself is hurt', the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything -- so they believe and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair