October 2010
51 posts
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“‘That was very big,’ she said. ‘I know brandy is for heroes,...”
– A Farewell to Arms
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“It was lovely in the nights and if we could only touch each other we were happy....”
– A Farewell to Arms
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I like Canadians
I like Canadians. They are so unlike Americans. They go home at night. Their cigarettes don’t smell bad. Their hats fit. They really believe that they won the war. They don’t believe in Literature. They think Art has been exaggerated. But they are wonderful on ice skates. A few of them are very rich. But when they are rich they buy more horses Than motor cars. Chicago calls...
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I Like Americans
I like Americans. They are so unlike Canadians. They do not take their policemen seriously. They come to Montreal to drink. Not to criticize. They claim they won the war. But they know at heart that they didn’t. They have such respect for Englishmen. They like to live abroad. They do not brag about how they take baths. But they take them. Their teeth are so good. And they wear B.V.D.’s...
uniquethinker asked: I noticed someone asked about the quote you reblogged from me. I actually shortened the entire conversation quite a lot and removed sentences of narration, because I liked the repetition of "I want to go to South America" in the dialogue and wanted it on my blog without a long chat. Just thought you should know that it wasn't a complete excerpt.
davidquigg asked: Did you mean to truncate the last thing Jake says in the Jake/Robert dialogue you posted? Reading it in 2010, I cringe, but Jake says, "Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses."
source: http://tinyurl.com/23ldpfm
source: http://tinyurl.com/23ldpfm
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Robert: Would you go to South America with me?
Jake: No.
Robert: I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.
Jake: Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
Robert: I'm not interested in bull-fighters. That's an abnormal life. I want to go back the the country in South America. We could have a great trip.
Jake: Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?
Robert: No, I wouldn't like that.
Jake: I'd go there with you.
Robert: No; that doesn't interest me.
Jake: That's because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.
Robert: I want to go to South America.
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“I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your...”
– A Farewell to Arms.
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“I leaned forward in the dark to kiss her and there was a sharp stinging flash....”
– A (sigh) Farewell to (sigh) Arms
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“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting...”
– A Moveable Feast
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“Everyone needs to talk to someone…for everyone there should be someone to speak...”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls (via jayarhess)
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It started with Nick Adams.
“I discovered Nick while reading through the collected stories of Ernest Hemingway a while back, and it is his voice, more than any others in the Hemingway corpus, that sticks with me years later. Nick Adams is in many ways Hemingway’s alter ego. Like Hemingway, Nick grew up in a rural part of the Midwest that still felt like (that still was, perhaps) Indian territory. Like...
“And his suicide had its own terrible logic. A man who was so intent on...”
– David Carr, on the death of Hunter S. Thompson, “The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage,” The New York Times, February 22nd, 2005
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“He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish...”
– The Old Man and the Sea
He did not want any consequences ever again.
“Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when the thought of them; the times so long back...
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“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The...”
– The Sun Also Rises (via silverreplies)
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“Tell me some true things about fighting.”
“‘Tell me you love me.”
“I love you,” the girl said. “You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all the other wounded places.”
- Across the River and Into the Trees
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“I got a sense of the power of restraint from Hemingway, which is the smallest...”
– “Norman Mailer Interview,” The Academy of Achievement, June 12, 2004
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Scott: 3:14 a.m.: Aye, aye, aye. TSAR is such a good book.
Scott: 2:32 p.m.: Apparently I texted you at 3 a.m. Sorry about that.
Scott: 2:33 p.m.: The colonel was being douchy and Robert Cohn-like. I think it was related to that.
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Death to your Darlings
INTERVIEWER
So do you end up cutting a lot of material from your earlier drafts?
MAMET
Well, you know, Hemingway said it once: “To write the best story you can, take out all the good lines.”
- The Paris Review’s Art of Theater No. 11, David Mamet interviewed by John Lahr
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Even More Bukowski on Hemingway
“…The word. I’m on the way to the track, opening day at Hollywood Park, but I’ll tell you about the word. To get the word down proper, that takes courage, seeing the form, living the life, and getting it into the line. Hemingway takes his critical blows now from people who can’t write…
…Hemingway studied the bullfights for form and meaning and courage...
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“I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room...”
– A Farewell to Arms (via fuckyeahgoodbooks)
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Great American Writers and Their Cocktails - NPR →
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“And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives,...”
– For Whom the Bell Tolls
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“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit...”
– Death in the Afternoon
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“You don’t know much, darling, for such a wise boy.”
– A Farewell to Arms (via vanity-press)
Write to live
“I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease into a vice. Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession. An obsession is terrible. Hope you haven’t gotten any. That’s the only one I’ve got...
As he walked he saw all the pairs of shoes, small shoes and big shoes, outside the doors of the hotel rooms. This set his heart to pounding and he hurried back to his own room but Cornelia was asleep.
— In Our Time, via wpergram
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened...”
– “Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba” Esquire, 1934
“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of...”
– The Old Man and the Sea (via foxbat)
“Lately I had read with distaste various books written about myself by people who...”
– From Hemingway’s journals, as published in Under Kilimanjaro/True at First Light (via allgirlsareheartshapedboxes)
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“In this town birds fly, but they’re not serious about it.”
– Hemingway on New York City, as quoted by Lillian Ross in The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Jouranalism (1998). He is also cited as saying he was unhappy in taxis because he could not sit in the front and watch the road ahead.
Hemingway as Journalist →
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After a while we came out of the mountains, there were trees along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain, and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind.
The Sun Also Rises,...
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Because it won't go away...
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera.
I dressed hearing the rain on the windows. I did not have much to put in my bag.
After a while, we were very still and we could hear the rain.
It’s very hard on loving.
It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain.
Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.
I’m afraid of the rain because...
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“Afterward I went to bed and when they were all asleep and she was sure they...”
– A Farewell to Arms
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“‘Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that harm...”
– Green Hills of Africa (1935)
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“All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when...”
– Green Hills of Africa (1935) 