“Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. Also, he had much bad luck, and it was not all of it his own. He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times. Nick could not write about him yet, although he would, later,”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Everything good he had ever written he'd made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn't understand. They thought it was all experience. Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he had never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“He had already learned there was only one day at a time and that is was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any farther today. He”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
Ernest Hemingway
Born place: in Oak Park, Illinois, The United States
Born date July 21, 1899
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“for those that would be kept from any sin must be careful to avoid all temptations to it, and every thing that looks towards it or leads to it.”
― Matthew Henry, quote from Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible
“It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we wanted wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. Life would be one long party.
Yes, that had been the dream.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Dead of Night
“That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value. But this is a digression indeed....”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from Under Western Eyes
“How do we exorcise one of the Jinn?"
He shrugged. "You got Yellow Pages?"
"Seriously?"
Jai snorted. "Yes, Ari. There are Aissawa Exorcists in the Yellow Pages."
Huffing, Ari walked away from him. "You really need to work on intonation when you use sarcasm. That way people will know when you're being an asshole."
"And you need to work on your gullibility."
"Well, I was under the impression you have no sense of humour so forgive me for believing everything you say."
"Well that should be fun."
"See!" she threw over her shoulder. "No intonation.”
― Samantha Young, quote from Smokeless Fire
“He looked at her for a moment, amazed. "How did you know that? How can a servant girl like you understand so much?"
Because self-absorbed man-children are common as weeds, thought Mary. But she said, "I don't know, sir. I only guessed.”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
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