《The Quiet American》Graham Greene

I saw that she was doing her hair differently, allowing it to fall black and straight over her shoulders.  I remembered that Pyle had once criticized the elaborate hairdressing which she thought became the daughter of a mandarin.  I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.

"You can rule me out," I said.  "I'm not involved.  Not involved," I repeated.  It had been an article of my creed.  The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved.

A chance of death?  Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night?  But I knew the answer to that question.  From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.  Always I was afraid of losing happiness.  This month, next year, Phuong would leave me.  If not next year, in three years.  Death was the only absolute value in my world.  Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever.  I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them.  I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent.  Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying.  The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift.  I could never have been a pacifist.  To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit.  Oh yes, people always, everywhere, love their enemies.  It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

Time has its revenges, but revenges seems so often sour.  Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child?  Perhaps that's why men have invented God - a being capable of understanding.  Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

If only it were possible to love without injury - fidelity isn't enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her.  The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.