Sometimes literature just resonates with you. It takes your meager circumstances and elevates them or mirrors them in the higher plane of that which you are reading.
"When once he was within the cabin there was nothing to do but kiss. He avoided her mouth—the mouth reveals so much, but she wouldn't be content until she had pulled his face round a left the seal of her return on his lips. 'Oh my dear, here I am.'
'Here you are,' he said
...
Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need—and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance.
...
'Missing Mass on Sunday's a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.'
'Adultery's more fun,' he said with attempted lightness.
...
...he felt his whole personality crumble with the disintegration of lies.
...
'Why do we go on like this—being unhappy?'
'It's a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,' Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole situation into a textbook case, as they had turned Pemberton, peace might return to both of them, a kind of resignation.
...
One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided—that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye.
...
'But I simply don't understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?'
How often he though, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, 'You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villages on the slopes of Vesuvius go on...And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love—any kind of love—does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don't believe on will pay for ever.
...
'I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn't know how to repent the love.'
...
'It's not much good confessing if I don't intend to try. . . .'
'Well then,' she said triumphantly, 'be hung for a sheep. You are in—what do you call it—mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?'
He thought: pious people, I suppose, would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence."
From Book III, Part I, Chapter I of Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. Read. Buy.
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