Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (Page 3 of 4)

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Here's the beautiful lady with the beer.

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.

We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. -- Ernest Hemingway.

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.

The best ammunition against lies is the truth, there is no ammunition against gossip. It is like a fog and the clear wind blows it away and the sun burns it off.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective.

Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

Any man who eats dessert is not drinking enough.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves.

I never trust frank and simple people whose stories hold together.

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

It is silly not to hope, besides I believe it is a sin. The Old Man and the Sea.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

But did thee feel the earth move?

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.

For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her.

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day.

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you're yet to be.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

Write as well as you can and finish what you start.

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Isn't it pretty to think so.

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.

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

Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter then ever.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey.

Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.

We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.

Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.

We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it anymore.

He wrote it exactly and the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath.

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

All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing.

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.

Some websites accepted each quote we create.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.

Oh, darling, she said. You will be good to me, won't you?
What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying.
You will, won't you? She looked up at me. Because we're going to have a strange life.

What is moral is what you feel good after.

And chase hard and good and with no mistakes and do not overrun them.

The Purdey was not a Purdey but a straight-stocked long-barreled Scott live-pigeon full choke in both barrels thai I had bought from a lot of shotguns a dealer had brought down fron Udine to the Kechlers' villa in Codroipo.

You may not believe this. No one believes this, but it is true.

The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.

I'm going to stay with you. If you go to jail, we might as well both go.

I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.

I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

He was not in love yet, but he realized that he was an attractive quantity to women, and that the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle.

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, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it some time. Try and take it.

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.

I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.

She had the lovely high cheekbones for arrogance.

The one who is doing the work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one poverty is hard on.
Heminway talking about his wife Hadley.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk... that will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-- -Ernest Hemingway.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty... The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima.

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.

Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

I am always in love.

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

It's a town you come to for a short time.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

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.

I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it's never done.

I regarded home as a place I left behind in order to come back to it afterward.

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

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

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.

Write drunk; edit sober.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye -- that was the trouble -- I wanted to kiss you good night -- and there's a lot of difference.

Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.

Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, everything will get better and sun will shine brighter than ever.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it -- don't cheat with it.

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

The first draft of everything is shit.

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Life is pain, so live it up while you can.

All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.

Night is always darker before the dawn and life is the same, the hard times will pass, every thing will get better and sun will shine brighter than ever.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.