Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”

“I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.”

“Please tell me what can I do. There must be something I can do”

“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”

“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.”

“You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

“Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you.”

“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.”

“The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.”

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

“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.”

“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 another.”

“The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.”

“To be successful in writing, use short sentences.”

“Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.”

“He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.”

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.”

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

“I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.”

“Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.”

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

“I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?”

“Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.”

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

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.”

“You'll lose it, if you talk about it”

“Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”

“Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.”

“Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well”

“This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.”

“He's a great writer. If I didn't think so I wouldn't have tried to kill him... I was the champ and when I read his stuff I knew he had something. So I dropped a heavy glass skylight on his head at a drinking party. But you can't kill the guy. He's not human.”

“Courage is grace under pressure.”

“I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.”

“All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spitoons.”

“For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.”

“Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.”

“When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.”

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

“Every day above earth is a good day.”

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

“An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”

“Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.”

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

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

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

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”

“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”