Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
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It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
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If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
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Modern life ... is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
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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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It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.
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But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
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People fall in love, but have to climb out.
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It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea.
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The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
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We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
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I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
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I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.
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By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
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Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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A big lie is more plausible than truth.
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A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.
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My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.
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I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.
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In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.
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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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There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.
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When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.
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The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.