Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.
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Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
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The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.
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Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.
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I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.
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You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
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I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
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They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.
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It's a town you come to for a short time.
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There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.
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To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.
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The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.
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They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.
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Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
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All thinking men are atheists.
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A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
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The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
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Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
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All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
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There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.
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Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
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It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.
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About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.