Children, Hadley thinks to herself, children are more civilised than this gang on the sauce.

No man should be asked to live with so much sadness, and with so little promise of relief.

Ernest chose to go, she finally thinks, watching the fire turn the papers black. He loved her but he could not live anymore.

I want to be a good man, a good writer.""Be one or the other, Ernest, not both.

But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.

She kissed him but he didn't seem to recognize it.

The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.

Don't worry," she says. "Ernest always attracted obsessives. You were only one of many. And secretly, sometimes, I think he was flattered. Nobody ever stalked Fitzgerald.

The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river.