“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants (1927)

Near the end of the dialogue · spoken by The girl (Jig)

Context

The story is a thinly veiled conversation between an unnamed American man and a young woman at a Spanish train station; he is pressuring her to have an abortion, which is never named directly. After pages of his calm, manipulative reasoning, the woman finally breaks.

How the repetition works

Seven "please" iterations with no punctuation between them. Hemingway, master of the iceberg style, breaks his own rule of restraint precisely once in this story — to register exhaustion that ordinary syntax could not contain. The repetition does the work that an exclamation point would in a lesser writer.