The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Duff Twysden as Brett, Hemingway as Jake Barnes, and Harold Loeb as Robert Cohn.

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

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

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

Brett looked at me. “I was a fool to go away,” she said. “One’s an ass to leave Paris.”

We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.

We went out into the street again and took a look at the cathedral. Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other, I forget what.

the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time;

The funny thing is he’s nice, too. I like him. But he’s just so awful.”

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had. Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement.

was full of people. We had to wait for a table. After lunch we went over to the Iruña. It had filled up, and as the time for the bullfight came it got fuller, and the tables were crowded closer. There was a close, crowded hum that came every day before the bull-fight. The café did not make this same noise at any other time, no matter how crowded it was. This hum went on, and we were in it and a part of it.

“I hate his damned suffering.”

“You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.”

saw the Escorial out of the window, gray and long and cold in the sun, and did not give a damn about it.