Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
-
I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
-
You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
-
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
-
How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
-
When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
-
You've such a lovely temperature.
-
It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
-
I don't like to leave anything,' the man said. 'I don't like to leave things behind.
-
That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
-
I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.
-
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
-
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.
-
Never fall in love?" "Always," said the count. "I am always in love.
-
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of the country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
-
The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.
-
In those days, there was no money to buy books.
-
where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.
-
Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.
-
There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.
-
The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.
-
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
-
I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.
-
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.