Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.
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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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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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Some people, when they hear an echo, think they originated the sound.
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In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
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The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
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Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.
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The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought
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I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
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My big fish must be somewhere.
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Work could cure almost anything
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Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad.
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All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
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In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
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I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.
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The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.
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Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your nerves.
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Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.
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Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.
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His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
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To hell with the Church when it becomes a State and the hell with the State when it becomes a Church.
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In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.
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Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.
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I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.