Ernest Hemingway, Quotes

Any form of betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.

Make it all up. But make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. Ernest Hemingway

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.

Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.

Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

It had been wonderful and they had been truly happy and he had not known that you could love anyone so much that you cared about nothing else and other things seemed inexistent.

But you mustn't believe in killing, he told himself. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. If you believe in it the whole thing is wrong.

When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.

I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

No one ever stopped when they were winning.

To hell with luck. I'll bring the luck with me.

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.

I dried my hands and took out my pocket-book from the inside of my tunic hanging on the wall. Rinaldi took the note, folded it without rising from the bed and slid it in his breeches pocket. He smiled, "I must make on Miss Barkley the impression of a man of sufficient wealth. You are my great and good friend and financial protector."
"Go to hell," I said.

My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.

You had to trust the people you worked with completely or not at all, and you had to make decisions about the trusting.

The smallest coffins are the heaviest.

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

He looked at his face carefully in the glass, put a big dab of lather on each cheek-bone. "It's an honest face. It's a face any woman would be safe with."
"She'd never seen it."
"She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face.

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

The reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.

Que va," the boy said. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you.

The one experience that he had never had he was not going to spoil now. He probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn't

we are all bitched from the start

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.

You could not go back. If you did not go forward what happened?

Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour.

He looked at the sky and saw the white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice cream and high above were the thin feathers of the cirrus against the high September sky.

To show his nervousness was not shameful; only to admit it.

But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn't there more dialoge? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn't do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Some one ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.

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.

In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work.

The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.

Bill was buying shoe-shines for Mike. Bootblacks opened the street door and each one Bill called over and started to work on Mike. "This is the eleventh time my boots have been polished," Mike said. "I say, Bill is an ass.

You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.

He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he thought, the birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?

They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.

The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.

Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars

He said nothing.

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?

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.

My big fish must be somewhere.

I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

You are not supposed to like things. Only to understand.

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense, but just enough to be careless.
"For God's sake," I said, "yes, don't you?"
"Oh, how charmingly you get angry," he said. "I wish I had that faculty.

What do you want? Everything. I want everything and I will take whatever I get.

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.

When you have been concentrating so hard on something you can't stop and your brain gets to racing like a fly-wheel with the weight gone. You'd better just not think.

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

The only thing that can ruin a good day is people.

A young dame with pretty eyes and a smile can make an old man do just about anything.

If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

And this was the price you paid for sleeping together.

Poor goddamned rummies,' Marie said. 'I pity a rummy.'
'He's a lucky rummy.'
'There ain't any lucky rummies,' Marie said. 'You know that, Harry.'
'No,' I said. 'I guess there aren't.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

If you have to go away,' she said,'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? ...

Oh Daddy, can't you give her something to make her stop screaming?" asked Nick.
"No. I haven't any anesthetic," his father said. "But her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important."
-Indian Camp-

I shouldn't have gone out so far, fish," he said. "Neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.

The hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There's worse things than lose an arm. You've got two arms and you've got two of something else. And a man's still a man with one arm or with one of those. The hell with it,' he says ... after a minute he says, 'I got those other two still.

Remember him," Brett said. "I do. Remember him perfectly. Look, Jake, we'll come down the night

I'm not advocating the strenuous life for everyone or trying to say it's the choice form of life. Anyone who's had the luck or misfortune to be an athlete has to keep his body in shape. The body and mind are closely coordinated. Fattening of the body can lead to fattening of the mind. I would be tempted to say that it can lead to fattening of the soul, but I don't know anything about the soul.

Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

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.

He whispered this last so low that it was inaudible to anyone that did not love you.

What is mashing?" "It is one of the most heinous of crimes," his father answered. Nick's imagination pictured the great tenor doing something strange, bizarre, and heinous with a potato masher to a beautiful lady who looked like the pictures of Anna Held on the inside of cigar boxes. He resolved, with considerable horror, that when he was old enough he would try mashing at least once.

The clasp of the gold chain

Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on the cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the coral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

A brave man is always frightened three times by a lion; when he first sees his track, when he first hears him roar and when he first confronts him.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time ...

But are there not many fascists in your country?"
"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the times comes.

My family's going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they're trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That's what I hear. I hear they're buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they're going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.

If you have plenty of money, want not to see but to have seen a bullfight and plan no matter whether you like it or not to leave after the first bull, buy a barrera seat so that someone who has never had enough money to sit in a barrera can make a quick rush from above and occupy your expensive seat as you go out taking your pre-conceived opinions with you.

Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.

But, thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able. The

How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!

If you ever live to be as old as I am you will find many things strange." "You never seem old." "It is the body that is old. Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk. And the spirit is no older and not much wiser." "You are wise." "No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." "Perhaps that is wisdom." "It is a very unattractive wisdom.

There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.

How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.

The fact the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life was a tragedy and knew it could have only one end.

In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found.

The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.