Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”

“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.”

“When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.”

“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

“What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”

“Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”

“There is no rule on how to write.”

“And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No”

“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.”

“A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.”

“He knew he would not be afraid. Even if he ever was afraid he knew that he could do it anyway.”

“You've such a lovely temperature.”

“The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.”

“There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.”

“Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us.”

“The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.”

“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.”

“It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.”

“It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.”

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

“There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.”

“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.”

“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”

“We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it.”

“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”