Ernest Hemingway Quotes - Page 2

He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven?
Ernest Hemingway
Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. 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.
Ernest Hemingway
What you don't write is often more important than what you do
Ernest Hemingway
Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.
Ernest Hemingway
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.
Ernest Hemingway
Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Ernest Hemingway
Don't you believe I love you? Don't know how I can make you believe. I didn't want to kiss you goodbye--that was the trouble--I wanted to kiss you goodnight. […] Of course I love you. I love you all the time. […] I'd like to hold you and kiss you so that you wouldn't doubt whether I wanted to or not.
Ernest Hemingway
Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.
Ernest Hemingway
I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.
Ernest Hemingway
A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.
Ernest Hemingway
Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
Ernest Hemingway
One cat just leads to another."[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).]
Ernest Hemingway
A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
Ernest Hemingway
I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]
Ernest Hemingway
She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things,
Ernest Hemingway
The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.
Ernest Hemingway
I wonder. Of course maybe that isn't what they figure to do. Maybe they aren't going to do any such thing. But it's natural that's what they would do and I heard that word.
Ernest Hemingway
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.
Ernest Hemingway
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945
Ernest Hemingway
A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
Ernest Hemingway
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
Ernest Hemingway
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
Ernest Hemingway
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Ernest Hemingway
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
Ernest Hemingway
You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.
Ernest Hemingway
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
Ernest Hemingway
In order to write about life first you must live it.
Ernest Hemingway
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.
Ernest Hemingway
Named Harris," Bill said. "Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too.""Fortunate fellow," Mike said. "What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.
Ernest Hemingway
To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.
Ernest Hemingway
I had gone...to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and 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.
Ernest Hemingway
Blood is thicker than water,"The young man saidAs he knifed his friendFor a drooling old bitchAnd a house full of lies.
Ernest Hemingway
Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. ... Harry didn't say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again.
Ernest Hemingway
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.
Ernest Hemingway
He was mad and plenty brave.
Ernest Hemingway
I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish,” he said. “Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry, fish.
Ernest Hemingway
At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.
Ernest Hemingway
It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone.
Ernest Hemingway
Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
Ernest Hemingway
I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway
They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.
Ernest Hemingway
Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers.
Ernest Hemingway
Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.
Ernest Hemingway
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Ernest Hemingway
What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. 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
He felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him.
Ernest Hemingway
The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?''Of course. Who said it?''I don't know.''He was probably a coward,' she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.
Ernest Hemingway
Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.
Ernest Hemingway
If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about.
Ernest Hemingway
You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Ernest Hemingway
The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.
Ernest Hemingway
Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.
Ernest Hemingway
I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and Ilove thee more.
Ernest Hemingway
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
Ernest Hemingway
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
Ernest Hemingway