Sun Also Rises Quotes

Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

Never fall in love?" "Always," said the count. "I am always in love.

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

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. I went in to lunch.

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

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.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together

'The Sun Also Rises' by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it.

In fact, I always assumed that most everything I read was true, to one degree or another. I couldn't articulate this fact until after I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and he discussed Happening Truth, Story Truth, and Emotional Truth. I always understood that the facts of The Sun Also Rises or On the Road were the facts as dictated by a certain narrative structure, but because the experiences of those characters echoed my own feelings about the world. I knew there was a Happening Truth behind them.

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.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

There is a classic moment in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that’s all I can say too.

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.

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 cafTs.

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.

["The Sun Also Rises" is about] bullfighting, bullslinging and bullsh[*]t.

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.

A bottle of wine was good company.

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?

Why does anyone stay in an unhappy relationship? Because people do. They do it all the time. And the truth is, when you're in it, when you're up to your neck in the everyday part of life with another human being, sometimes you don't exactly notice how bad things really are.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?