He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.
He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.
You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me.
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.
It is the fault of the orders, which are too rigid. There is no allowance for a change in circumstance.
But I think the Great DiMaggio would be proud of me today.
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.
You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?
Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false springàBut Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.
The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought
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.
I'm not brave any more darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me.
Your blood coagulates beautifully.
Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.
Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.
Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.
The old man's head was clear and good now and he was full of resolution but he had little hope. It was too good to last, he thought. He took one look at the great fish as he watched the shark close in.
It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting.
I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.
You've such a lovely temperature.
Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.
For what are we born if not to aid one another?
Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.
Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well
Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.
A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
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.
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
So if your life trades seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.
He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.
Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
He killed more men than the cholera.
So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a very merry one.
I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.
Where did you wash? the boy thought. The village water supply was two streets down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket.
Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories