Allowed Her Hair to Fall Back and Straight Over Her Shoulders

Phuong …allowed her hair to fall back and straight over her shoulders… …as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest. P24. …was wonderfully ignorant: if Hitler had come into the conversation she would have interrupted to ask who he was.p25. She was indigenous like a herb. p28 She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair. P34 …eighteen years old…p52 …she is delicate. She needs care. She deserves care. She is very, very loyal…She loves children. p55. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace p58. To take an Annamite (вьетнамка) to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow. There had been a time when I thought none of their voices sang like Phuong’s. I put out my hand and touched her arm – their bones too were as fragile as a bird’s. p26 She must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she been fond of me and hadn’t she left me for Pyle? She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair. P34 …she seems fresh, like a flower. P113. They love you in return for kindness, security, the presents you give them – they hate you for a blow or an injustice…she won’t run away from home so long as the home is happy. P116. She told me that she had missed me , which of course was what I wanted to hear: she always told me what I wanted to hear. P146 She’s no child. She’s tougher than you’ll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn’t take scratches? That’s Phuong…She’ll never suffer like we do from thoughts , obsessions – she won’t scratch, she’ll only decay. P169 She was not a girl to break her habits p196

Alden Pyle …he was very meticulous about small courtesies. p23. …he was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East…Democracy was another subject of his, and he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the US was doing for the world. P24. …age thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission, nationality American p29. A quiet American. P29. …an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm. P30 “A quiet American,” I summed him up precisely up as I might have said, “a blue lizard,” “a white elephant.” P31 He was absorbed in the dilemmas of Democracy and the Responsibilities of the West: he was determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. He was in his element now with the whole universe to improve. P34 …he belonged to the sky-scraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.p37 …before he died he had been responsible for at least fifty deaths…p34. Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, …and he was very, very serious. P39 … he had an enormous respect for what he called serious writers,…it was better to read the straight stuff as you got it from York Harding. P40 York wrote that the East needed a Third Force. P42 They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. P50 He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lectures made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A red menace, a soldier of democracy. P 50 …he looks a nice reliable man. P54. He is from Boston. His father is a professor. p54. “I’ve always thought I’d like a lot of children…A big family’s a wonderful interest. It makes for the stability of marriage…I was an only child. It’s a great disadvantage being an only child.” P55. Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. P58 …you are straight , and we both have her interests at heart …a few snipers would not have worried him; he was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others. P85 F: I was to see many times that look of pain and disappointment touch his eyes and mouth, when reality didn’t match the romantic ideas he cherished , or when someone he loved or admired dropped below the impossible standard he had set. P97 Tell her I don’t expect her to love me right away. That will come in time, but tell her what I offer is security and respect. That doesn’t sound very exiting , but perhaps it’s better than passion. His sad eyes would inquire mutely after Phoung, while his lips expressed with even more fervour the strength of his affection and of his admiration for me. P97. “You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested.” P106. …his soft dog’s eyes in the night.p113. His conversation never took the corners. P116. To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you…p124. He’ll always be innocent , you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate (устранять) them. Innocence is a kind of insanity. p202 He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance. P202 Pyle made the mistake of putting Harding’s idea into practice. Harding wrote about a Third Force.

Thomas Fowler I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines. “American official murdered in Saigon” Working on a newspaper one does not learn the way to break bad news, and even now I had to think of my paper. P37 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. P45 …a man of middle-age, with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight, ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger but more cynical, less innocent…p52. About Pyle :That was my first instinct – to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper (безмолвный прокаженный) who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. P56 All the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favor, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism. P193 I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. Death was the only value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. I could have never been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. P64. Pyle:…you are straight , and we both have her interests at heart I’m not a Roman Catholic. I don’t think you could even call me a Christian. If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. …to me it seems morbid (отвратительный) – unmanly even. P70 …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. P75 (sustained metaphor) wife: She’s High Church. P82 F: I don’t care that for her interests. I only want her body p83 Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another. Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers. P84 I hadn’t youth, seriousness, integrity, a future. P98. I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable (необъяснимое). P113. I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there…even a Roman Catholic believes in quite a different God when he’s scared or happy or hungry…p105. They want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want. P106. I don’t take sides. I’ll be still reporting, whoever wins. P108. I’d like those two poor buggers there to be happy – that’s all. P108. I’m still in love and I’m a wasting asset…and there was pride of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. P114 I was afraid of losing love. Now I’m only afraid of losing Phuong. P115. I’ve reached the age when sex isn’t the problem…I just don’t want to be alone in my last decade, that’s all. P116. One shouldn’t fight a war with children and a little curled body in a ditch came back to mind. P121. I don't take sides. I'll be reporting , whoever wins. P123 I had prided myself on detachment, on not belonging to this war…p126. I know the depth of my selfishness. I cannot be at ease if someone else is in pain…p126. I came east to be killed p140 I’m afraid of the loneliness…I’m afraid of Pyle p148 If only it was 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… Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. P150 Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night. P174 I became a bore on the subject of America. P174 You don’t know what I’m escaping from. It’s not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved. P187 Everything had gone right with me since he had died , but now I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry. P229