"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast"
About this Quote
Paris isn’t a place here so much as a portable state of mind: a private ration of beauty, hunger, and permission that Hemingway claims you can carry like contraband. The line works because it flatters the reader’s nostalgia while also issuing a dare. “If you are lucky enough” makes Paris sound less like a destination than an initiation, the kind you don’t earn so much as survive. It’s the classic Hemingway move: emotional extravagance smuggled inside plainspoken syntax.
The subtext is about youth as a scarce resource. “As a young man” is doing heavy lifting, implying that Paris is most potent when you’re broke enough to be porous to experience, ambitious enough to mistake hardship for romance, and restless enough to turn every café into a classroom. The phrase “moveable feast” is crucial: a feast suggests abundance, but moveable suggests impermanence. That tension is the point. Paris feeds you, then leaves you hungry in a productive way; the appetite becomes the souvenir.
Context sharpens the intent. Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast decades later, looking back on the 1920s expatriate scene with equal parts tenderness and self-mythmaking. Postwar Paris becomes a moral alibi: a time when art felt urgent, friendship felt formative, and poverty could be narrated as purity. The sentence sells a version of cultural capital that’s also emotional insurance. Wherever life sends you, he implies, you’ll have an inner Paris to measure it against - and to escape into when the world turns dull.
The subtext is about youth as a scarce resource. “As a young man” is doing heavy lifting, implying that Paris is most potent when you’re broke enough to be porous to experience, ambitious enough to mistake hardship for romance, and restless enough to turn every café into a classroom. The phrase “moveable feast” is crucial: a feast suggests abundance, but moveable suggests impermanence. That tension is the point. Paris feeds you, then leaves you hungry in a productive way; the appetite becomes the souvenir.
Context sharpens the intent. Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast decades later, looking back on the 1920s expatriate scene with equal parts tenderness and self-mythmaking. Postwar Paris becomes a moral alibi: a time when art felt urgent, friendship felt formative, and poverty could be narrated as purity. The sentence sells a version of cultural capital that’s also emotional insurance. Wherever life sends you, he implies, you’ll have an inner Paris to measure it against - and to escape into when the world turns dull.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | A Moveable Feast — Ernest Hemingway, 1964 (posthumous collection of Paris memoirs). The quoted line appears as the book's opening. |
More Quotes by Ernest
Add to List
