A Moveable Feast

by Ernest Hemingway

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter,

I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

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.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

These were fragrant, colorless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses and whether they were quetsche, mirabelle or framboise they all tasted like the fruits they came from, converted into a controlled fire on your tongue that warmed you and loosened it.

had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

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.

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.

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.

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

Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding.

Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water.

This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

Lyon was not a very cheerful town at night. It was a big, heavy, solid-money town, probably fine if you had money and liked that sort of town.

Scott then asked me if I were afraid to die and I said more at some times than at others.

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

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 you the same way the first one did.

My words would become something that would have to be destroyed and sometimes, if possible, me with them.

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.

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.