The quiet American

Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practised. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older—I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

he Vietnamese don’t like throwing anything away, any more than a Chinese cook partitioning a duck into seven courses will dispense with so much as a claw.

t was as if I had been betrayed, but one is not betrayed by an enemy.

he didn’t change; she cooked for me, she made my pipes, she gently and sweetly laid out her body for my pleasure (but it was no longer a pleasure)

I made love to her in those days savagely as though I hated her, but what I hated was the future

One never knows another human being

of us. She’ll get old, that’s all. She’ll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she’ll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions—she won’t scratch

I said, ‘If you are hinting that you are a Communist, or a Vietminh, don’t worry. I’m not shocked. I have no politics

it had got caught up accidentally in the junk: I felt caught up in it myself

Sometimes when his fever was bad his face ran with sweat, but he never lost the clarity of his thought