Mrs. Hemingway Quotes

“The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“Don't worry," she says. "Ernest always attracted obsessives. You were only one of many. And secretly, sometimes, I think he was flattered. Nobody ever stalked Fitzgerald.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“Oh no. I split my time between Paris and New York. They're the only places to really live.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“I want to be a good man, a good writer."
"Be one or the other, Ernest, not both.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“Sometimes there's this feeling of things being repeated. I put the needle on the same place in the same track and I expect a different tune.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“Paris without a good book is like a pretty girl with only one eye.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“An album follows, a book of wives. In each picture of each couple a ghost wife hovers behind them. Each decade has its triptych.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“For Ernest’s fiftieth they ate lunch in the garden with all of their friends: winter-melon soup, slippery chicken, ice cream in coconut halves.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Martha thinks how typical all of this is of him: he wants his wife, he wants his mistress, he wants everything he can get. He is not so much greedy for women as blind to what he thinks he needs and so he grabs at everything. Wives and wives and wives”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“But marriage, she thought, was for women who wanted to stay put and play tennis with the neighbors and have cocktail hour on the lawn in full dresses. Martha didn’t want any of that. She wanted to be with him traveling from war to war. They were correspondents, not stay-at-home pals.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Just remember not to try too hard with understanding it,” Sylvia says. “Like people, they’re best not to be too thoroughly understood.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Paris without a good book is like a pretty girl with only one eye.’ Who said that, Adrienne?” Adrienne rolls her eyes and takes the empty glass back into the pantry. “Balzac, chérie,” she says, with the sound of the faucet running in the back. “But he said it about dinner without cheese.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Not like Sara and Gerald, the stoics among them. Living well, they insisted, was the best revenge. And sometimes, Fife could almost be convinced that this was true.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Maybe that story about the valise being stolen was just another piece of fiction and Hadley had tossed the case to the garbage. When Ernest wanted, he could do an outstandingly good impression of a shit. She could imagine how much a woman might want to teach him a lesson.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“How vehemently in a French church had she prayed for one husband to leave his wife! And now Fife may well be losing the same man in her own church. It seems to her that these are, now, the irreducible components of marriage: theft, possession, recompense. And Ernest’s affair with Martha: this may well be her reckoning.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“It’s not that she doesn’t love them; it’s just that there is always so much to do: editing Ernest’s work, instructing the servants, restoring the house; then there were the trips with Ernest when he wanted to go quail shooting, or deep-sea fishing, or to the bullfights in Spain. She was his wife; it left little time for her to be a mother as well.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Because she is out of her depth! Because Hadley doesn’t have a hope in hell against you. She has no friends. No family. No money. Everything you have, she does not.” “I’m your sister. Where’s your sympathy for me?” “You have everything!”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Mrs. Hemingway had never exactly blended into their set: she wasn’t exactly a wit or bon viveur. Sara had said the same thing: Hadley was a wonderful mother and wife, but not quite the companion for a wild party, or, necessarily, a wild author. Fife liked to think Ernest had found that in her. The playmate. The partygoer. Her wealth had also seemed attractive to him. She didn’t care what that made her. Or him. Sara said that when they’d married, on that warm May day in Paris in 1927, their group came to look just as it always should have.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Their Paris apartment is so bare that she knows all the other expatriate women must laugh at her and yet, until this spring, she didn’t much care what they thought of her. They have been very poor, but not without the promise of things getting better. That was all she had needed.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“There was that rich woman’s sense of entitlement: of deserving a particular object only by virtue of desiring it, whether it was a bicycle or a Schiaparelli dress or another woman’s husband.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“After that night, Fife started coming round regularly, as if she’d picked up a taste for their bohemian poverty. Their apartment, despite its shabbiness, she said was positively ambrosial.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs Hemingway

“Marriage would wreck us. Both of us...I'm sorry. It's just not right for me.'
'Don't you love me?'
'Of course I love you. But that doesn't mean I want to marry you.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“I am not a woman apt to be left.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“His study is dark as an inkwell even in the Florida sun.

This paradise of lemon light and hot sweet air.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“He loved her but he could not live anymore.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“Ah yes, she has forgotten that success should come effortlessly or not at all. It’s always got to be playtime. Cocktail hour. As if life were always a mooning adolescence or always blindingly fun. Hard work was for other people.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“The longer I don't write, the more I hurt.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“What a feat, she thinks, to want to marry every woman he fucks. He is so good at being in love that Ernest Hemingway makes a rotten husband.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway