“I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.”
"For sale: Baby shoes. Never used."
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
“And you'll always love me won't you?
Yes
And the rain won't make any difference?
No”
― A Farewell to Arms
“Write hard and clear about what hurts. ”
“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.”
― A Moveable Feast
“God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her”
― A Farewell to Arms
“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”
“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.”
― The Sun Also Rises
“We're stronger in the places that we've been broken.”
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”
“If my Valentine you won't be,
I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.”
― 88 Poems
“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. 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.
In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”
― A Moveable Feast
“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
“In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”
―The Complete Short Stories
“And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.”
―Islands in the Stream
“I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.”
―The Garden of Eden
“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.”
