Musings on Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

It’s a memoir of Hemingway’s life in Paris in the 1920s. The brilliance of this book lies in the way it talks about the most mundane things of everyday life, and makes you see them in a new light. Hemingway frequently talks about the weather, the streets of Paris, his not having enough money to eat, but he makes it a vivid, entertaining read.

What’s more- in the midst of it all, he manages to slip in profound reflections on life. And finally, the book is also a commentary on writing itself.

Couple of my favorite quotes from the book:

‘The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.’

‘“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.’

‘I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebooks and this pencil.’

‘When spring came, even the false spring, here 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 limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.’

‘It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm. It only seemed odd to the rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.’

‘But 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.’

‘When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. 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. I put the racing capital back to the general funds and I felt relaxed and good.’