The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories Quotes

“We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

“If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories

“With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories

“Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person's fault.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

“Also, he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

“He was very embarrassed, having brought out this thing he had lived by, but he had seen men come of age before and it always moved him. It was not a matter of their twenty-first birthday.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

“How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories

“Wilson looked at them both. If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories

“Why not let up on the bitchery just a little, Margot,” Macomber said, cutting the eland steak and putting some mashed potato, gravy and carrot on the downturned fork that tined through the piece of meat.“I suppose I could,” she said, “since you put it so prettily.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

“They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories