The Sun Also Rises quotes

“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?

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.

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.

It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting.

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.

At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.

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.

You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.

It’s sort of what we have instead of God.

The river looked nice. It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.

Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

“I was a fool to go away,” she said. “One’s an ass to leave Paris.”

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.

Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett.