Timothy Warren > Timothy's Quotes

“I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never
understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife - and I pray most fervently that there is not - I can only hope that they wont sing. Be of good cheer, Squire. This was the ongoing adjuration of the early Christians and in this at least they were right. You know that I've always thought your history unnecessarily embittered. Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.

p.347”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. To that I have no answer.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“The defeated have their cause and the victors have their victory.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“Names are important. They set the parameters for the rules of engagement. The origin of language is in the single sound that designates the other person. Before you do something to them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach ( . . . ) That the man knows not how to even name that which enslaves him hardly lightens his burden.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― 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

“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, 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

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

“I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now—not desire, but only the reminder of it?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“She had often disconcerted me by the truth. In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth—that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“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 the jealous Judas, or the cowardly Peter, who loved Christ.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“She was too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.”
― 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

“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

“I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“You'd taken my disbelief into Your love, keeping them to show me later, so that we could both laugh.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible;”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy,”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I am a jealous man—it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy,”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair