Суть дела

He felt as though he were turning his back on peace for ever. With his eyes open, knowing the consequences, he entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Life always repeated the same pattern: there was always,
sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting
lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery
away.

"Go on/' Helen said, "justify yourself."

"It would take too long," he said. "One would have to
begin with the arguments for a God."

"Oh," she said impatiently, "why do you always tell me
the truth? I don't want the truth all the time."

"Your work is much more important to you than I am/'
Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how
many books, wrung his heart like the too mature remark
of a child.

He had been in Africa when his own child died. He had always thanked God that he had missed that. It seemed after all that one never really missed a thing. To be a human being one had to drink the cup.

"Do you love me, Ticki?"

"What do you think?"

"Say it. One likes to hear it even if it isn't true."

She was not so happy as he would have expected: she
always saw a little further than he hoped.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of good will carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price.