Ernest Hemingway quotes about disillusionment

Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.

We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.

It is in defeat that we become Christian.

It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian army.

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.

I saw how their minds worked; if they had minds and if they worked. They were all young men and they were saving their country.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

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

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.

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.

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 it was all about.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

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

“Everybody behaves badly,” I said. “Give them the proper chance.”

It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.

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?

Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in.

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 up something and got something else.

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’s sort of what we have instead of God.

You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.

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.

The three of us sat at the table, and it seemed as though about six people were missing.

“The Purple Land” is a very sinister book if read too late in life.