Ernest Hemingway Quote
That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others ... But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others ... But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
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About Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. After high school, he spent six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918. In 1921, Hemingway moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and was influenced by the modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. In 1928, Hemingway returned to the U.S., where he settled in Key West, Florida. His experiences during the war supplied material for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.
In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, written in Havana, Cuba. During World War II, Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. In 1952, his novel The Old Man and the Sea was published to considerable acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. On a 1954 trip to Africa, Hemingway was seriously injured in two successive plane crashes, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. He committed suicide at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.