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She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad.
It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything.
“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
“Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don’t you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles? But promise me you won’t worry and that you’ll eat enough.”
Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it.
“Was Henry James a gentleman?” “Very nearly.” “Are you a gentleman?” “Naturally. I have held His Majesty’s commission.” “It’s very complicated,” I said. “Am I a gentleman?” “Absolutely not,” Ford said.
“Suppose you wanted to be a writer and felt it in every part of your body and it just wouldn’t come.”
“Don’t you care about life and the suffering of a fellow human being?” “Not you.” “You’re beastly.” “Yes.” “I thought you could help me, Hem.” “I’d be glad to shoot you.”
“You shouldn’t write if you can’t write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don’t talk about it. You could never write.”
“You’re just cruel,” he said. “Everybody always said you were cruel and heartless and conceited. I always defended you. But not any more.” “Good.”
“You had the air of a man alone in the jungle,” he said. “I am like a blind pig when I work.” “But were you not in the jungle, Monsieur?” “In the bush,” I said.
When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all of your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink.
At home, over the sawmill, we had a Corsican wine that had great authority and a low price. It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.
In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries.
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him, as you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding.
I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
Later I was delighted that I had used up the anger at the start and gotten it over with. It was not a trip designed for a man easy to anger.
In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.
He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St.-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt
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There was going to be everything that a man needed to write except to be alone.
All things truly wicked start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.
When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.
