Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education.
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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. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.
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You're awfully dark, brother," he said. "You don't know how dark.
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It is silly not to hope, besides I believe it is a sin." The Old Man and the Sea
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It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
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All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion.
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I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.
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A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.
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You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
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Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.
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And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?
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This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
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Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.
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In war, one cannot say what one feels.
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I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.
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As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
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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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Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
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I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
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You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]
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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.
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Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
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No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.