Ernest Hemingway, Quotes & Sayings

I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard. The light was changed again and I had missed the change. I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good. — Ernest Hemingway,

This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it. — Ernest Hemingway,

As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself. — Ernest Hemingway,

My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine. — Ernest Hemingway,

In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing. — Ernest Hemingway,

It came very fast and the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in it and it was snow. — Ernest Hemingway,

The smallest coffins are the heaviest. — Ernest Hemingway,

I wonder why he jumped, the old man thought. He jumped almost as though to show me how big he was. I know now, anyway, he thought. I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence. — Ernest Hemingway,

Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he sees you as ugly as you really are and he is not blind anymore and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling ... — Ernest Hemingway,

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide. — Ernest Hemingway,

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. — Ernest Hemingway,

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on. — Ernest Hemingway,

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write? — Ernest Hemingway,

I am an old man who will live until I die, Anselmo said. — Ernest Hemingway,

Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill. — Ernest Hemingway,

The educated man is the man who can do something. The quality of his work marks the degree of his education. — Ernest Hemingway,

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on. — Ernest Hemingway,

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be — Ernest Hemingway,

The old man drank his coffee slowly. It was all he would have all day and he knew that he should take it. For a long time now eating had bored him and he never carried a lunch. — Ernest Hemingway,

The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave. — Ernest Hemingway,

I am like a blind pig when I work. — Ernest Hemingway,

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. — Ernest Hemingway,

But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting. — Ernest Hemingway,

If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came? — Ernest Hemingway,

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten. — Ernest Hemingway,

I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable. — Ernest Hemingway,

You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn. — Ernest Hemingway,

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth. — Ernest Hemingway,

It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone. — Ernest Hemingway,

In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unelated and he hated every one he saw. — Ernest Hemingway,

Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. — Ernest Hemingway,

You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane. — Ernest Hemingway,

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better. — Ernest Hemingway,

I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains. — Ernest Hemingway,

In order to write about life first you must live it. — Ernest Hemingway,

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out. — Ernest Hemingway,

I can't say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was lovely in the nights and if we could only touch each other we were happy. Besides all the big times we had many small ways of making love and we tried putting thoughts in the other one's head while we were in different rooms. It seemed to work sometimes but that is probably because we were thinking the same thing anyway. — Ernest Hemingway,

I drink to make other people more interesting. — Ernest Hemingway,

I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad. — Ernest Hemingway,

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima — Ernest Hemingway,

If a man liked his friends' painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. — Ernest Hemingway,

A kidder gets to be an awful thing around a camp if his stuff goes sort of sour. — Ernest Hemingway,

You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I've been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn't want to destroy me again, would you? — Ernest Hemingway,

For what are we born if not to aid one another? — Ernest Hemingway,

The fish is my friend too," he said aloud. "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. 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. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour 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. Now, — Ernest Hemingway,

Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey — Ernest Hemingway,

Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris. — Ernest Hemingway,

How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden. — Ernest Hemingway,

There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid. — Ernest Hemingway,

And Barcelona. You should see Barcelona." "How is it?" "It is all still comic opera. First it was the paradise of the crackpots and the romantic revolutionists. Now it is the paradise of the fake soldier. The soldiers who like to wear uniforms, who like to strut and swagger and wear red-and-black scarves. Who like everything about war except to fight. Valencia makes you sick and Barcelona makes you laugh. — 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,

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood. — Ernest Hemingway,

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. then you write for who you love whether they can read or write or not and whether they are alive or dead. — Ernest Hemingway,

Maybe ... you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too. — Ernest Hemingway,

Yes, they have more money. — Ernest Hemingway,

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. — Ernest Hemingway,

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world. That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust. — Ernest Hemingway,

Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars — Ernest Hemingway,

He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. — Ernest Hemingway,

She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places. — Ernest Hemingway,

If an angel out of heaven Gives you something else to drink, Thank him for his kind intentions; Go and pour them down the sink. — Ernest Hemingway,

What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gipsy obscenity? What are you doing? — Ernest Hemingway,

If there's empty spaces in your heart,
They'll make you think it's wrong,
Like having empty spaces,
Means you never can be strong,
But I've learned that all these spaces,
Means there's room enough to grow,
And the people that once filled them,
Were always meant to be let go,
And all these empty spaces,
Create a strange sort of pull,
That attract so many people,
You wouldn't meet if they were full,
So if you're made of empty spaces,
Don't ever think it's wrong,
Because maybe they're just empty,
Until the right person comes along. — Ernest Hemingway,

It was never what he had done,but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil — Ernest Hemingway,

I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it. — Ernest Hemingway,

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. — Ernest Hemingway,

It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. — Ernest Hemingway,

There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly. — Ernest Hemingway,

My big fish must be somewhere. — Ernest Hemingway,

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful. — Ernest Hemingway,

The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed. — Ernest Hemingway,

She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful. 'Hello,' I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me — Ernest Hemingway,

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 is was all about. — Ernest Hemingway,

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work. — Ernest Hemingway,

Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves sad and happy all at the same time Going away isn't really sad especially when your going enables a new kind of presence to be born. — Ernest Hemingway,

If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about. — Ernest Hemingway,

I watched him walk back to the cafe holding his paper. I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life. — Ernest Hemingway,

Finishing is what you have to do. If you don't finish, nothing is worth a damn — Ernest Hemingway,

We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. The place has not even been swept out yet and they have an amateur pianist beating on the box — Ernest Hemingway,

You'll lose it, if you talk about it — Ernest Hemingway,

Que va," the boy said. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you. — Ernest Hemingway,

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. — Ernest Hemingway,

... Her lips an island in the sudden white sea of pain that came in a shining, unbearable, rising, blinding wave and swept him clean. — Ernest Hemingway,

Together they made the bed with me in it. That was new to me and an admirable proceeding. — Ernest Hemingway,

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. — Ernest Hemingway,

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence. — Ernest Hemingway,

In war, one cannot say what one feels. — Ernest Hemingway,

No. Have it here where it is quiet." "You and your quiet", said Brett. "What is it men feel about quiet?" "We like it," said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear. — Ernest Hemingway,

Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. — Ernest Hemingway,

You have to make it inside of yourself wherever you are. — Ernest Hemingway,

In that way they really were friends, understanding in their basic disagreement, trusting in their complete distrust and enjoying one another's company. — Ernest Hemingway,

I can write a short story in six words. For sale: baby shoes, never used — Ernest Hemingway,

But, thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able. The — Ernest Hemingway,