Ernest Hemingway

'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.

'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'

'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.'

It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank.

We’ll wait and see. Come on back in the shade, he said. You mustn’t feel that way.

I don’t feel any way, the girl said. I just know things.

I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do——

Nor that isn’t good for me, she said. I know. Could we have another beer?

All right. But you’ve got to realize——

I realize, the girl said. Can’t we maybe stop talking?

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

You’ve got to realize, he said, that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to.

I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.

Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.

Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.

Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.

It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.

Would you do something for me now?

I’d do anything for you.

Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

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?'

Four times he swung with the bull, lifting the cape so it billowed full, and each time bringing the bull around to charge again. Then, at the end of the fifth swing, he held the cape against his hip and pivoted, so the cape swung out like a ballet dancer’s skirt and wound the bull around himself like a belt, to step clear, leaving the bull facing Zurito on the white horse, come up and planted firm, the horse facing the bull, its ears forward, its lips nervous, Zurito, his hat over his eyes, leaning forward, the long pole sticking out before and behind in a sharp angle under his right arm, held half-way down, the triangular iron point facing the bull.

I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have.

Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.

The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders.

All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.