Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.
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I say that is wine," Brett held up her glass. "We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.'" "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste." Brett's glass was empty.
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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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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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I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.
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Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.
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Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
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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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Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.
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Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
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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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She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.
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You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?
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The cat has complete emotional honesty - an attribute not often found in humans.
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Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.
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Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.
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Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.
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You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
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No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
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My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.
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Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it.
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As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
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As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
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Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride.