The Garden of Eden - Hemingway Quotes

They were always hungry but they ate very well. They were hungry for breakfast which they ate at the cafe, ordering brioche and cafe au lait and eggs, and the type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement.

On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly and ground pepper over them in cups.

"I'm the destructive type," she said. "And I'm going to destroy you. They'll put up a plaque on the wall of the building outside the room."

The young man paid for the lunch and drank the wine that was left in the bottle. Then he went upstairs. The girl's clothes were folded on one of the Van Gogh chairs and she was waiting for him in the bed with the sheet over her. Her hair was spread out over the pillow and her eyes were laughing and he lifted the sheet and she said, "Hello, darling. Did you have a nice lunch?"

They were hungry for lunch and the bottle of white wine was cold and they drank it as they ate the celery remoulade and the small radishes and the home pickled mushrooms from the big glass jar. The bass was grilled and the grill marks showed on the silver skin and the butter melted on the hot plate. There was sliced lemon to press on the bass and fresh bread from the bakery and the wine cooled their tongues from the heat of the fried potatoes.

She slipped out of bed and stood straight with her long brown legs and her beautiful body tanned evenly from the far beach where they swam without suits. She held her shoulders back and her chin up and she shook her head so her heavy tawny hair slapped around her cheeks and then bowed forward so it all fell forward and covered her face.

She had always looked, he thought, exactly her age which was now twenty-one. He had been very proud of her for that. But tonight she did not look it. The lines of her cheekbones showed clear as he had never seen them before and she smiled and her face was heartbreaking.

"You don't mind if we've gone to the devil, do you?"
"No, girl," he said.

"You see," she said. "That's the surprise. I'm a girl. But now I'm a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything."

They ate a steak for dinner, rare, with mashed potatoes and flageolets and a salad and the girl asked if they might drink Tavel. "It is a great wine for people that are in love," she said.

"Let's lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all," he said and his heart said goodbye Catherine goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye.

But he was very worried now and he thought what will become of us if things have gone this wildly and this dangerously and this fast? What can there be that will not burn out in a fire that rages like this?

You're lucky to have a wife like her and a sin is what you feel bad after and you don't feel bad. Not with the wine you don't feel bad, he told himself, and what will you drink when the wine won't cover for you?

"You're awfully good. If I didn't love you for anything else I'd love you for your decisions."

He drank the hero drink but it did not taste so good and he ordered a fresh bottle of cold Perrier and made a short drink without ice.

What was it that she had said about destruction? He could not remember that. She'd said it but he could not remember it.

He loved her very much and everything about her and he went to sleep thinking about her cheek against his lips and how the next day they would both be darker from the sun and how dark can she become, he thought, and how dark will she ever really be?

"You know I haven't done anything bad to us. I had to do it. You know that."

Be careful, he said to himself, it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

At the cafe he found the morning paper and the Paris papers of the day before and had his coffee and milk and the Bayonne ham with a big beautifully fresh egg that he ground coarse pepper over sparsely and spread a little mustard on before he broke the yolk.

"What did you do, Devil?"

The waiter brought them glasses of manzanilla from the lowland near Cadiz called the Marismas with thin slices of jamon serrano, a smoky, hard cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns, and bright red spicy salchichon, another even spicier dark sausage from a town called Vich and anchovies and garlic olives. They ate these and drank more of the manzanilla, which was light and nutty tasting.

"I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it's just like being hungry all the time and there's nothing you can ever do about it."

"Yes," she said. "I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture. It was awful. Now that I'm all right again I hope it still lasts."

"Stay the way you are."
"What makes your voice be different when you say it? I think I'll do it now."
"No. Not now."
"Thank you for the not now."

She can't blush again, David thought. But she did.

"People that can't blush are worthless."

"You're not afraid of him now are you?" Catherine asked her.
"Not at all," the girl said. She blushed again. "It tastes very good but terribly strong."
"They are strong," David said. "But there's a strong wind today and we drink according to the wind."

"I hope she will be happy," the girl said. "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

"I wish I could remember what it was we lost. But it doesn't matter does it? You said it didn't matter."

"Perversion is dull and old fashioned. I didn't know people like us even kept up on it."
"I suppose it's only really interesting the first time one does," Catherine said.

It was a shame a man with such a talent for disaster and for delight should have gone the way he went, he thought.

"Do you want to swim down once before we go in?"
"Just once," she said. "In this very deep part."
"We'll swim down until we can just make it up."

They kissed and she said, "Everything of ours washed into the ocean."

His father was not vulnerable he knew and, unlike most people he had known, only death could kill him.

His father, who ran his life more disastrously than any man that he had ever known, gave marvelous advice.

"The hell with you too."
"That's good. Now you're reacting better. I like when you are more careless. Kiss me goodbye. I mean good afternoon."

"So what do you and I do?"
"What we can."

"I'll put on one of my tight shirts so you can tell what I think about things," she said.

"It's terrible to be in bed together and be lonely."

"You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn."

He could not help wanting to read it with her and he could not help sharing what he had never shared and what he had believed could not and should not be shared.

I do love her and you make a note of it, whiskey, and you witness it for me, Perrier old boy old Perrier, I have been faithful to you, Perrier, in my fucking fashion.

"All I want to do is kill you," David said. "And the only reason I don't do it is because you are crazy."

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

...he found that he still could be, and was, moved by her.