The 7th book I read in 2024 was ‘A Moveable Feast’ by Ernest Hemingway. This was my third reading of the book although after quite a long time. I had forgotten most of the details. I didn’t quite get into it this time around. Until I really got into it. The small, simple sentence that are about the mundane and then suddenly about a lot more. Beautiful writing often disguised in simple words. I highly recommend reading this small book even though there are parts of it that don’t seem to belong in an important memoir. A memoir that feels rich but not eventful. And that is a very good thing.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book.

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

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”

“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.”

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. 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.”

“There was always an almost iridescent shiny cast about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed ski run…”

“Is Ezra a gentleman?” I asked. “Of course not,” Ford said. “He’s an American.”

 “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.”

“…the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.”

 “In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi.”

 “Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house.”

“While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald.”

“There was going to be everything that a man needed to write except to be alone.”

“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”

 “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

 “Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

Other recent posts on books.