'The Sun Also Rises' Quotes

Ernest Hemingway's Famous Lost Generation Novel

THE SUN ALSO RISES By Ernest Hemingway
ROBERT HUFFSTUTTER roberthuffstutter/ Flickr CC

The Sun Also Rises brought Ernest Hemingway fame and fortune. The novel became one of the most well-known books of the lost generation. The story was largely based on the lives of Hemingway and his friends in Paris following World War I. Here are a few quotes from this famous book by Ernest Hemingway.

Quotes From the Epigraph Through Chapter Five of The Sun Also Rises

"You are all a lost generation."

"I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life."

"'Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.'"

"'Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.'"

"This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."

Quotes From Chapter Six Through Chapter Ten of The Sun Also Rises

"You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development."

"Don't have scenes with your young ladies. Try not to. Because you can't have scenes without crying, and then you pity yourself so much you can't remember what the other person's said."

"We all ought to make sacrifices for literature. Look at me. I'm going to England without a protest. All for literature."

"[S]he took great pride in telling me which of my guests were well brought up, which were of good family, who were sportsmen, a French word pronounced with the accent on the men. The only trouble was that people who did not fall into any of those three categories were very liable to be told there was no one home, chez Barnes."

"This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste."

"I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time."

"I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn--nor as eager. I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody."

"I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him."

Quotes From Chapter Eleven Through Chapter Nineteen of The Sun Also Rises

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés."

"For one who had aficion he could forgive anything. At once he forgave me all my friends. Without his ever saying anything they were simply a little something shameful between us, like the spilling open of the horses in bull-fighting."

"It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people."

"I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave something up and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good."

"Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it."

"That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality."

"The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta."

"I hate his damned suffering."

"Oh, darling, please stay by me. Please stay by me and see me through this."

"In bull-fighting they speak of the terrain of the bull and the terrain of the bull-fighter. As long as a bull-fighter stays in his own terrain he is comparatively safe. Each time he enters into the terrain of the bull he is in great danger. Belmonte, in his best days, worked always in the terrain of the bull. This way he gave the sensation of coming tragedy."

"Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself."

"That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right."

"[T]he end of the line. All trains finish there. They don't go on anywhere."

"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch."

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

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Lombardi, Esther. "'The Sun Also Rises' Quotes." ThoughtCo, Jul. 29, 2021, thoughtco.com/the-sun-also-rises-quotes-741551. Lombardi, Esther. (2021, July 29). 'The Sun Also Rises' Quotes. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/the-sun-also-rises-quotes-741551 Lombardi, Esther. "'The Sun Also Rises' Quotes." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-sun-also-rises-quotes-741551 (accessed March 28, 2024).