'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.' — Ernest Hemingway

'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.'

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 by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.

'Listen Jake... don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?'