Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays (Vintage Contemporaries)

in a few moments, a young soldier can see and hear enough, taste and touch and smell enough, to age his spirit by decades, while his body has not aged at all. The quickness of this change, of the spirit’s immersion in horror, may cause a state of detachment from people whose lives are still normal, and who receive mortality’s potion, drop by tiny d

Hemingway once said that he had very little natural talent and what people called his style was simply his effort to overcome his lack of talent. Don’t take that lightly. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

“And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?… Maybe the light is going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a

“Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change.” —Ernest Hemingway, “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio”