The Quiet American

by Graham Greene… A book which views life from behind very dark glasses.

• The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw: I took no action — even an opinion is a kind of action.
• […] I had been examining Pyle’s innocent question: ‘Are you playing straight?’ It belonged to a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the u as it’s spelt on old tombstones, and you meant what your father meant by the same words.
• […] we make a cage for air with holes, I thought, and man makes a cage for his religion in much the same way — with doubts left open to the weather and creeds opening on innumerable interpretations.
• Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?
• […] voices have a colour too, yellow voices sing and black voices gargle, while ours just speak […]
• It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalise the strangest surroundings.
• We are fools […] when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing — I don’t know if she really was, but I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.
• To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself.
• If only it were possible to love without injury — fidelity isn’t enough […]. 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.
• Silence like a plant put out tendrils: it seemed to grow under the door and spread its leaves in the room where I stood.
• I never like giving information to the police. It saves them trouble.
• Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night.
• […] there was no way to get out: you were trapped with your experience. […] All was feeling now, nothing was sight. […] For forty seconds Pyle had not existed: even loneliness hadn’t existed.
• […] you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.
• Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.
• Sooner or later, […] one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.