Ernest Hemingway · 189 pages
Rating: (316.9K votes)
“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”
“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”
“Isn't it pretty to think so.”
“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
“Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
“This is a good place," he said.
"There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.”
“I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.”
“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
“Never fall in love?"
"Always," said the count. "I am always in love.”
“You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.”
“Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.”
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”
“He'll never be frightened. He knows too damn much.”
“I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together”
“You are all a lost generation.
[with credit to Gertrude Stein]”
“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch."
"Yes."
"It's sort of what we have instead of God.”
“She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.”
“I say that is wine," Brett held up her glass. "We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.'"
"This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste."
Brett's glass was empty.”
“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.”
“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
“The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals”
“This is a hell of dull talk...How about some of that champagne?”
“You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.”
“The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.”
“What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank of either race in that world.”
“Imagine the one god himself has reversed his clock and reversed your regrets. Imagine knowing the bone-deep truth that whatever impossibility would make you truly happy has been granted. Imagine knowing you can once again hold your lost lover or your newborn child. Imagine what you feel during those first seconds of knowing. Now, imagine those first seconds last for days on end.
....
Like I said, I'm a chemist. It's all coming back to me.p62”
“They were good listeners, worldly yet easily shocked, hungry for details, curious and nonjudgmental at the same time, always happy to give advice, but only if it was requested.”
“I feel like I’m stuck in a bad movie, with a little devil sitting on one shoulder and an angel on the other. But the goddamn devil is twice the size and my angel is a fucking mute. Great, I have a fucking mute angel.”
“Is this to be my life? To rise up only to be brought back down to my knees, shattered into shards? We’d”
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