Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
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I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time.
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Write hard and clear about what hurts.
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I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
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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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It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.
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Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again." "Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?" "Yes. I want to ruin you." "Good," I said. "That's what I want too.
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He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."
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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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The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.
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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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The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.
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Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.
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Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
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Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.
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There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
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That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
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Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.
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The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.
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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.
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I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be
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My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
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Life breaks all of us but some of us get stronger in the broken places.
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There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!