'A Moveable Feast' Quotes

A Moveable Feast is a collection of memoirs by Ernest Hemingway, famous American writer. Learn more about Hemingway's experiences in Paris--with these quotes from his famous book.

• "All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine and died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "Miss Stein thought that I was too uneducated about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Miss Stein Instructs," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Une Generation Perdue," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Shakespeare and Company," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "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."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "People of the Seine," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "But then we did not think of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. we thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "A False Spring," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "But for a long time it was enough just to be back in our part of Paris and away from the track and to bet on your own life and work, and on the painters that you knew and not try to make your living gambling and call it by some other name."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "The End of an Avocation," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Hunger is Good Discipline," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of a saint. He was also irascible but so perhaps have been many saints."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Ezra Pound and his Bel Esprit," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "In the end everyone, or not quite everyone, made friends again in order not to be stuffy or righteous. I did too. But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "A Strange Enough Ending," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "The Man Who Was Marked For Death," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo was, "Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only when he needs it."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "An Agent of Evil," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Scott Fitzgerald," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "Zelda had a very bad hangover. They had been up on Montmartre the night before and had quarreled because Scott did not want to get drunk. He had decided, he told me, to work hard and not to drink and Zelda was treating him as though he were a kill-joy or a spoilsport."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "Hawks Do Not Share," A Moveable Feast
  
  
• "Schruns was a good place to work. I know because I did the most difficult job of rewriting I have ever done there in the winter of 1925 and 1926, when I had to take the first draft of The Sun Also Rises which I had written in one sprint of six weeks, and make it into a novel."
  -Ernest Hemingway, "There Is Never Any End to Paris," A Moveable Feast