The Quiet American

‘The trouble was,’ I said, ‘he got mixed up.’ ‘To speak plainly,’ Vigot said, ‘I am not altogether sorry. He was doing a lot of harm.’ ‘God save us always,’ I said, ‘from the innocent and the good.’ ‘The good?’ ‘Yes, good. In his way. You’re a Roman Catholic. You wouldn’t recognize his way. And anyway, he was a damned Yankee.’

I said, ‘We seem to have talked about pretty nearly everything except God. We’d better leave him to the small hours.’ ‘You don’t believe in Him, do you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.’ ‘They don’t make sense to me with him.’

The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen enough?’ speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

I knew I was inventing a character just as much as Pyle was. One never knows another human being; for all I could tell, she was as scared as the rest of us: she didn’t have the gift of expression, that was all. And I remembered that first tormenting year when I had tried so passionately to understand her, when I had begged her to tell me what she t

Opium makes you quick-witted—perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.

‘Is he in the mortuary?’ I asked Vigot. ‘How did you know he was dead?’ It was a foolish policeman’s question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without intuition.

‘Have you any hunch,’ he asked, ‘why they killed him? and who?’ Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns. I said, ‘Yes. They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and sill

It was the Economic Attaché. He beamed down at us from the terrace above, a great warm welcoming smile, full of confidence, like the man who keeps his friends because he uses the right deodorants.

Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble.