Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

After someone recommended that I read Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair," I took a trip to barnesandnoble.com to check it out. The reviews were so-so but I reluctantly bought it.

It's true that the beginning is a bit slow, but after I was into it, I couldn't put it down. This tragic love story about affairs, friendships, and relationships with God is one of the best books I have ever read.

Maurice Bendix and Sarah both realize God, a realization that they had been resisting and avoiding for so long. Greene describes it as though they cannot hate God anymore, so they eventually start to love. At the end of the book, he describes love and hate as equals. To hate God is to love God. Bendix, who begins the novel with the declaration that this is a book about hate gives in to his love. It is a story about love and hate as one.




Noteworthy quotes:

"Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire."

"...but I was keen only for my desk, my sheet of paper, that quota of words dripping slowly, methodically, from the pen."

"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 monstous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. Bus happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity."

"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."

"But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace - he needs it more."

"...because 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."