Which book features the quote "Fish you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?"?

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) a short novel of an old, down-on-his luck Cuban fisherman twined with the monstrous fish at the end of his line, battling him for three days.

The old man's struggle is lengthy: the line, his back and hands, a bottle of water, some strips of fish for sustenance, endurance, a direct dialogue with the fish. It's appealingly simple and poetic.

On pages 91 and 92 he says:

'Fish,' the old man said. 'Fish you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?' You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

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16 Comments

filmnut

I love Hemingway.

klmilles

He wrote this book in 8 weeks and won the Nobel Prize the next year for this book. He appears to have suffered from bipolar disorder, in addition to alcoholism & hemochromatosis, and his rapid generation of a Nobel Prize winning book suggests a manic episode (and yes, he had been thinking about this book for 16 years prior to writing it, but to complete it in so short a time is impressive). His family's history of suicide and emotional problems is also tragic. His grandaughter, Mariel, wrote about her family history in "Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family" which was made into a documentary called "Running from Crazy."

Char

I missed it but this was my second choice..

earlepg

james parrillo, I thought the options were very good and chose the old fisherman because of the boat in the picture.

james parrillo

Weren't those just wonderful options? Thank you, Christine, James's wife

Jaimi McEntire

With only 27,000 words, it's really more of a "story" than a "novel". Short novels have 40,000 words or more. Novels 80,000-120,000. We were taught it was a story in school. Novel is quite a stretch for this.

Richard G Schwartz

Great q and a.

Marguerite LaHaye

I loved this book, and read it from cover to cover in a couple of hours. I remember too that my brother wrote a Grade 8 book report on The Old Man and the Sea for his English class. The teacher criticized him for picking out "a little kid's book." Such was the quality of elementary school education in Northern Ontario's mining towns in the 1960s.