Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
-
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
-
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
-
Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?
-
The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
-
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
-
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
-
There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
-
I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?
-
The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
-
Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?
-
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
-
If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.
-
One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.
-
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
-
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
-
Write hard and clear about what hurts.
-
It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.
-
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
-
In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.
-
Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.
-
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?
-
The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.
-
Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.