Ernest Hemingway · 272 pages
Rating: (6K votes)
“He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...”
“I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.”
“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.”
“He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a mine, that is within them.”
“It made him feel as a wound does that you think you cannot bear. But you can bear anything, he thought.”
“In America, they make such things of wire and of sponge-rubber, such as you use in the sets of tanks. You never know there, whether there is any truth in the matter, unless you are a bad boy as I am.”
“The colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four, and knows how to relax truly for five seconds or more.”
“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.”
“Thank you very much,” the girl said. “You know that another woman, or a woman in memory, is a terrible thing for a young girl to deal with when she is still without experience.”
“Ma che cosa posso raccontare a questa ragazza, ora, in questa fredda mattina ventosa al Gritti Palace Hotel?
“Che cosa vorresti sapere, Figlia?” le chiese
“Tutto quanto.”
“Va bene” disse il colonnello. “Incominciamo.”
“Next you will say that you don’t intend to have more than one house in the country!’ ‘Nay, I shan’t say that! I want one in Leicestershire.’ ‘Oh, in that case there’s no more to be said, for I’ve set my heart on one in the moon!’ ‘You don’t mean that, love! Nay then, you can’t have thought!’ he expostulated. ‘It’s much too far from town!”
“It wasn’t perfect, none of
it.
But it was a fairytale.
And people needed to believe in
fairytales. Even flawed ones.
Maybe especially flawed ones.
And they needed to believe always.”
“What are you giving him?"
She grins smugly. "Only the greatest gift a woman can give the man she loves."
I take my best guess. "Anal?"
Kate covers her eyes.
Dee-Dee's smile turns into a scowl. "No--pig. I'm giving him the gift of health. My acupuncturist cleared her schedule. She's going to work on Matthew the whole day."
I laugh. Because this explains so much.
"That's your gift? Really? It's the guy's birthday and you're gonna make him get needles stuck in his face all day? What are you gonna get him for Christmas - a colonoscopy?”
“Does he not know that even a pawn can take down the queen?”
“I came to college to study, Cass, not to whore myself out to drunken frat boys!”
She gaffawed. “Whatever, darlin’, you won’t be thinking of studying when your ankles are wrapped ’round some stud’s neck as he wears you like a necklace, tickling your belly button from the inside!”
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