“I remembered how Pyle, sitting on the floor, waiting for the Viets, had said, ‘She seems fresh, like a flower,’ and I had flippantly replied, ‘Poor flower.’ She would never see New England now or learn the secrets of Canasta. Perhaps she would never know security; what right had I to value her less than the dead bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engagé as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.”

—from The Quiet American by Graham Greene