Ernest Hemingway Quotes (Author of The Old Man and the Sea) (page 6 of 12)
“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“You must be prepared to work always without applause.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Here's a taxidermist's," Bill said. "Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?"
"Come on," I said. "You're pie-eyed."
"Pretty nice stuffed dogs," Bill said. "Certainly brighten up your flat."
"Come on."
"Just one stuffed dog. I can take 'em or leave 'em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog."
"Come on."
"Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog."
"We'll get one on the way back."
"All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“By "guts" I mean, grace under pressure”
― Ernest Hemingway
“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
“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,”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls: [And], The Snows Of Kilimanjaro ; [And], Fiesta ; [And], The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber ; [And], Across The River And Into The Trees ; [And], The Old Man And The Sea
“I know now that there is no one thing is true–it is all true.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”
― Ernest Hemingway
tags: writing
“It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories
“And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
“I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”
― Ernest Hemingway
tags: writing-advice
“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.”
― Ernest Hemingway, On Writing
“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories
“Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
“He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarreled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it . . . . How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman that looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he could never cure himself of loving her.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories
“I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
'It's a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.” Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
“There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had really happened.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“No Pilar," Agustin said. "You are not smart. You are brave. You are loyal. You have decision. You have intuition. Much decision and much heart. But you are not smart.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“I did not say anything. I was always embarresed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothin was done with the meat except to buy it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
tags: writing
“Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“I had learned already 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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“The bulls are my best friends."
I translated to Brett.
"You kill your friends?" she asked.
"Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
“Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"
"Yes, every once in a while."
"Do you know that in abou thirty- five more years we'll be dead?"
"What the hell, Robert," I said. "What the hell."
"I'm serious."
"It's one thig I don't worry about," I said.
"You ought to."
"I've had plenty to worry about one time or other. I'm through worrying."
"Well, I want to go to South America."
"Listen, Robert, 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."
"But you've never been to South America."
"South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don't you start living your life in Paris?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
“that every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery”
― Ernest Hemingway
“Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
“He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“I am an old man who will live until I die," Anselmo said.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
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