Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.
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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 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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Never confuse motions with action.
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War is not won by victory.
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He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.
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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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So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.
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I decided to stop drinking with creeps. I decided to drink only with friends. I've lost 30 pounds.
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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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Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?
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In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
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it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
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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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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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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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All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
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I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced.
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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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There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
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There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.
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Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France.
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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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Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.