A Moveable Feast

by Ernest Hemingway

windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.

Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it.

Goal

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe now.

If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved.

It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending.

By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment.

am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.

already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.

He has the irreplaceable early training of the bastard and a latent and long denied love of money.

Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced.

They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured.