Great Throughts Treasury

"No one you love is ever truly lost."

"No Pilar, Agustin said. You are not smart. You are brave. You are loyal. You have decision. You have intuition. Much decision and much heart. But you are not smart."

"No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

"No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one."

"No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience."

"No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess now. I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought."

"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."

"No. Have it here where it is quiet. You and your quiet, said Brett. What is it men feel about quiet? We like it, said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear."

"No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me."

"No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia, Karkov grinned and began. First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool. Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool."

"No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it."

"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."

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters."

"Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man."

"Nobody likes to life anchors."

"None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head."

"Not the why but the what."

"Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about."

"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."

"Now fix the drink and then tell me what happened."

"Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it."

"Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now."

"Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking."

"Now I have done what I can, he thought. Let him begin to circle and let the fight come."

"Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is."

"Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night. Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go."

"Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though."

"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."

"Oh Daddy, canÂ’t you give her something to make her stop screaming? asked Nick. No. I havenÂ’t any anesthetic, his father said. But her screams are not important. I donÂ’t hear them because they are not important."

"Oh Jake, Brett said, We could have had such a damned good time together. Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes, I said. Isn't it pretty to think so?"

"Oh, darling, I've been so miserable."

"Oh, darling, you will be good to me, wonÂ’t you? Because weÂ’re going to have a strange life."

"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."

"Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants."

"Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."

"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it."

"One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war."

"One cat just leads to another."

"Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready."

"Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock.""

"Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

"Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good."

"Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older. I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it always was."

"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."

"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."

"People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars."

"Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. 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."

"Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for."