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.”
“Those two priceless abilities: first, the ability to think. Second, the ability to do things in the order of their importance.”
“Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.”
“He woke with Max's arms wrapped around his torso and Max's genitals soft against his ass. And for the first time in days he wasn't aware of wanting anything but breakfast. Breakfast and Max. Not necessarily in that order.”
“You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn't got much in the way of family? Well here's the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I've lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them.”
“It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.”
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