Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.
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Optimism can keep a fool from accepting failure.
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You're awfully dark, brother," he said. "You don't know how dark.
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There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
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One cat just leads to another." [Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
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Life is pain, so live it up while you can.
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Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.
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Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.
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The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.
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There is no rule on how to write.
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The writer's job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.
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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
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There isnt always an explanation for everything.
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My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.
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You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.
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You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.
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Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.
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When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
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Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.
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Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.
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Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.
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Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
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The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.
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Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.