Lesley M.M. Blume quotes:

Are you watching the boats?" Cornelia guessed. She craned her neck to see if there was any excitement on the river.Heavens no, I'm spying on people," Virginia responded unrepentantly.-Cornelia E and Virginia Somerset

Hemingway himself and Hemingway's writing were both brilliant, brilliant cocktails.

Hemingway is a baby when he turns up in Paris, but he's an ambitious baby. And he has the talent. And he's there to stage his breakthrough. So many of the expats who were there at that time were there to do precisely that. It was an ambition-fueled town.

Hemingway's talent was so outsized, that I feel like I can forgive him a lot of his trespasses to have achieved what he did achieve.

I spent an awful lot of time with Hemingway. And Hemingway had a remarkable ability to reach very noble goals through sometimes ignoble means.

And so with Hemingway's writing, he famously wrote to one of his publishers - he said, you don't need a high school education to enjoy my writing. And it's going to titillate the masses. I mean, anybody can relate to it, but the style is so revolutionary that it will titillate highbrow critics, which it did.

Too many people realize at the end of their lives that they've taken for granted those who really love them.