A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway

I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was...

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget.

"I don't know," I said. "There isn't always an explanation for everything."
"Oh, isn't there? I was brought up to think there was."
"That's awfully nice."


"Have you ever loved any one?"
"No," I said.

I was angry and yet certain, seeing it all ahead like moves in a chess game.

"Oh, darling," she said. "You will be good to me, won't you?"
What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying.
"You will, won't you?" She looked up at me. "Because we're going to have a strange life."

She looked at me, "And you do love me?"
"Yes," I lied. "I love you." I had not said it before.

"You won't go away?"
"No. I'll always come back."

The major said he had heard a report that I could drink. I denied this.

"There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."

Then there was a flash, as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a road that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind.

The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were red as butchers.

"Come, come," he said. Don't be a bloody hero." Then in Italian: "Lift him very carefully about the legs. His legs are very painful. He is the legitimate son of President Wilson."

"You are really an Italian. All fire and smoke and nothing inside."

"My God what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her?"

"You understand but you do not love God."
"No."
"You do not love Him at all?" he asked.
"I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes."
"You should love Him."
"I don't love much."

"Hello, darling," she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had...

It was as though we met again after each of us had been away on a long journey.

I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind falls.

She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light that came in the open door and it shone even in the night as water shines sometimes just before it is really daylight.

"Don't talk as though you had to make an honest woman of me, darling. I'm a very honest woman. You can't be ashamed of something if you're only happy and proud of it. Aren't you happy?"

"I've always been afraid of the rain."

There was a great contrast between his world of pessimism and personal cheeriness.

"Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us."


"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?"
"Of course. Who said it?"
"I don't know."
"He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."

"I am very tired of this war. If I was away I do not believe I would come back."

"I will get you drunk and take out your liver and put you in a good Italian liver and make you a man again."

"No. We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. You never get anything new. We all start complete."

"I don't give a damn," Rinaldi said to the table. "To hell with the whole business." He looked defiantly around the table, his eyes flat, his face pale.
"All right," I said. "To hell with the whole damn business."

"No one ever stopped when they were winning."

"We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."

Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.

I could remember Catherine but I knew I would get crazy if I thought about her when I was not sure yet I would see her, so I would not think about her, only about her a little...

"I don't live at all when I'm not with you."
"I won't ever go away," I said. "I'm no good when you're not there. I haven't any life at all any more."

"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "that's what I want too."

"In the spring when it is nice you could come and enjoy it. We could put the little one and the nurse in the big room that is closed now and you and Madame could have your same room looking out over the lake."

"I'm not brave any more, darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me. I know it now."
"Everybody is that way."
"But it's awful. They just keep it up till they break you."

But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

"Don't worry, darling," Catherine said. "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick."

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.

Davita's Harp - Chaim Potok Quotes

He shot my mother a look of disgust. She came to below his shoulders in height but met the look defiantly, craning her neck and staring straight at him until he turned away.

My mother explained words to me in a special way. She would give me the present meaning of the words and a brief account of its origin. If she did not know its origin, she would look it up in the dictionary in the bedroom near my father's desk.

It was important for everyone to know all the time that they weren't alone, my aunt said.

My room turned cold again. I saw my breath on my window and wrote my name with my finger, using the penmanship I was learning in school. Illana Davita Chandal. My name written clearly on a window against the cold night.

A quality of intense power seemed to radiate from his fragility, from his hooded eyes and hoarse voice, from his occasional cough. I found myself often staring at him, fascinated, unable to take my eyes from his face.

I asked my mother what the word religious meant.
She said it came from an old word that meant to bind, to tie.

There is no feeling more terrible than loneliness, no feeling worse than the sensation of being locked inside your own heart.

"I am a writer of stories," he said quietly in his raspy voice. "A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life."

"Along the slope grew an unusual lilylike flower. Its outer leafy sepals were dark blue, its inner whorl of scented petals were pale blue, its stem was light purple."

And once again she turned and looked yearningly toward the cottage. She seemed to be measuring the steepness of the slope. Then the bird heard her murmur sadly, wearily, "I cannot endure the slope."

A long day in the sun on the margin of the sea.

He let me lead him into the water. He shivered with the cold and cried out as a wave broke too high against us and nearly knocked him off his feet. His face was white with fear. But I held onto him and soon the sea felt warm and we went deeper into the waves and I showed him how to ride the crests, how to anticipate the swells, how to jump as they billowed, what to do when they crash and came rushing toward us in a charging cascade of foaming water. We held hands and jumped up and down in the water, riding the waves.

"I would touch the surf. His ship was on this water and now I'm touching his ship."

He kissed me on my face and held me a long time. He was tall and strong and I loved him, my father, Michael Chandal.

"I don't like boats. Boats frighten me. People I love keep going away from me on boats."

"Forgive me. I do not like to play the game of if, Ilana. It gives me a headache, and worse, a heartache. No ifs, please."

...bits and pieces of broken dreams that kept piercing his troubled heart like shards of glass.

She stood and stepped slowly out of the boat into the water. It all seemed to take a very long time: the girl rising to her feet, the boat lurching, the astonished look on the rower's face as the girl simply walked off the boat and slid almost without a splash into the water, her dress ballooning up and covering her face, her hair billowing out behind her and then closing up like the petals of a flower as she sank.

I saw the sea move slowly back and forth upon the red earth like some breathing creature of vast and mysterious dimensions.

"O Heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty; open, we beseech Thee, our eyes to behold Thy gracious hand in all Thy works..."

There was comfort in the kneeling and a sense of my exhausted self yielding to the embrace of a presence I could not understand but felt all about me as I did the wind and the sea.

"In Him is life," she said.

We went on longer and longer rides through villages from another time, past red-sand dunes and long beaches to a coast where the sea was wild. And one afternoon we stood on a cliff near stunted, oddly shaped dead trees and watched the sea roll against a shoreline of jagged rocks, saw the wind-blown swells that were the juncture of two colliding tides crashing and boiling with a furious violence, and I was awed and a little frightened.

It was a young horse. I rode slowly with my heart thumping in my ears, feeling the horse beneath me, its rolling motions, its powerful flanks. I smelled its heat and saw the quivering motions of its muscular skin and held its mane and felt the air on my face. When the farmer helped me from the saddle I felt I had grown wings for a long moment and flown.

I remember coming upon my mother in the kitchen one night and seeing her at the table, her head in her hands. She was crying. She did not see me and I walked quietly away.

You can't forget the bad things that are done to you by telling yourself that the world isn't all bad. We really can know only the people and things that touch us. Everything else is like words in a dictionary. We can learn them but they don't live deep inside us.

Nothing I write can be as astonishing as life, which is indeed the strangest story of all.

She has had two lifetimes of sorrow already. She is the kindest and gentlest of birds, the sort whose suffering is almost never noticed. We must care for her and be gentle with her.

Like all other images burned into me over the years.

Happiness seemed to dance in her eyes like tiny specks of sunlight on the surface of a sea.

I did not turn. It was like rising and stepping slowly out of the boat into the lake. Slowly and deliberately and who cares what they think or say. I could feel them all looking at me as I opened the door and went out of the room and closed the door behind me.

I only wanted to say a few words, I said. That's all.
Say them, my love. That's what we came all this way to hear. Say them. We're listening to you.
I stood there, facing them, sunlight on my face.
I began to talk.

I wanted to say that I'm very frightened to be living in this world and I don't understand most of the things I see and hear and I don't know what will happen to me and the family I love.

She smiled. My brother and Jakob Daw didn't know it, she said softly, but they were possessed of a sacred discontent.

Be discontented with the world.

"I want to tell you a story. It's a strange story. It doesn't have an ending. But you might find it interesting anyway. It's a story about two birds and some horses on a beach far away. Are you listening, little Rachel? And it's about a door harp..."

The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan Quotes

That was the year both our heavens burned.

Later we all realized our heavens were not the same.

Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.

"You can never forget a thing. Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It's called holding a goddamn grudge."

I taught her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.

And then I felt myself becoming smaller yet denser, about to be crushed by the weight of my own heart, as if the laws of gravity and balance had changed and I was now violating them. I stared once again at those sharp little stars, twinkling like fireflies. Only now they were splotched and melting, and the night heaven was tilting and whirling, too immense to hold itself up any longer.

Kwan said that people in the World of Yin were very bad about making appointments, because nobody used a calendar or a clock anymore. The best method was to watch the moon. That was why so many strange things happened when the moon was at its brightest, Kwan said: "Like porch light, telling your guests, welcome-welcome, come inside."

And that's when I feel the grief for what we've lost over the years: the excitement and wonder of being in the world at the same time and in the same place.

Yet I'm also afraid that the core of my being, stripped of its mail-order trappings, is no different from that of the tenth person who stands on the road wishing for someone to stop and single her out.

You can't stop people from wishing. They can't help trying. As long as they can see sky, they'll always want to go as high as they can.

"Too many years, too many years," she says, as if chanting.

"Of course I knew. In my heart, I knew all the time."

Are we born with blank hearts, waiting to be imprinted with any imitation of love?

So you see? He was already being bossy, making decisions for me. That's how I knew we were married. That's how he told me I do.

"Let him despise me, otherwise he won't leave. Make sure he is safe. Promise me this."

"Only now I no longer feel it is a vacuum for hopes or a backdrop for fears. I see what is so simple, so obvious. It holds up the stars, the planets, the moons, all of life, for eternity. I can always find it, it will always find me. It is continuous, light within dark, dark within light. It promises nothing but to be constant and mysterious, frightening and miraculous. And if only I can remember to look at the sky and wonder about this, I can use this as my compass. I can find my way through chaos no matter what happens. I can hope with all my soul, and the sky will always be there, to pull me up..."

I lift my baby into my arms. And we dance, joy spilling from sorrow.