Hemingway

I just happened to read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises when I was here in high school.  Looking back, I'm not sure how much I got out of it then as it was my first introduction to him, but I do remember it gave a nice feel for the Spanish (or rather, the expatriate) way of life... albeit slightly disillusioned.  Having just made a pilgrimage to Pamplona where part of the book is set, I couldn't resist a homage to Hemingway, revisiting some of the book's wisdom.  I regret that these are from a Google search and not my own treasury of favorite lines, but it's surprising how many I remember.  Food for thought.

"You are all a lost generation."  - Epigraph

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters."

"It's awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it's another thing."

"Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference.  I've tried all that.  Yo can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.  There's nothing to that."

"In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean… the houses in the villages had red tiled roofs, and then the road turned off and commenced to climb and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea."

"You're not a moron, you're only a case of arrested development."

"We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.  Look at me.  I'm going to England without a protest.  All for literature."

"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."

"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're an expatriate, see.  You hang around cafes."

"They're only dangerous when they're alone, or only two or three of them together . . . they only want to kill when they're alone.  Of course, if you went in there, you'd probably detach one of them from the herd, and he'd be dangerous."

"That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterwards.  No, that must be immorality."

"Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something."