Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.
-
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.
-
Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.
-
War is not won by victory.
-
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
-
The fools think I am writing algebra but what I am really writing is geometry.
-
The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.
-
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
-
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
-
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.
-
I was always embarresed by the words 'sacred,' 'glorious,' and 'sacrifice' and the expression 'in vain.' We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
-
One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
-
There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly.
-
My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.
-
For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit?s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit?s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.
-
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
-
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.
-
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
-
And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.
-
Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.
-
Look at things and listen and feel.
-
It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.
-
We wait always for something that does not come.
-
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.