Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.
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You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.
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I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
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Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
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I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.
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Never confuse motions with action.
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Everyone my age had written a novel and I was still having difficulty writing a paragraph.
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If a writer stops observing, he is finished.
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Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
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Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish.
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The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
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It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.
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Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
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You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.
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What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
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Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.
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Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
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I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
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where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.
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No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things
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Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
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The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.
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I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.