Death Hemingway Quotes & Sayings

This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work. — Ernest Hemingway,

A year after Hemingway died on the front page, Faulkner went off after a binge, as if dying was nobody's business but his own. — Alfred Kazin

The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since. — Adam Mansbach

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,

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but also very fine. — 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,

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her. — Ernest Hemingway,

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. — Ernest Hemingway,

I wonder what your idea of heaven would be - A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows. — 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,

Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more. — Ernest Hemingway,

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. — Paul Kalanithi

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

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. — Ernest Hemingway,

He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements. — Ernest Hemingway,

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor. — Ernest Hemingway,

Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper. — 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,

I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life — Ernest Hemingway,

He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. I was embarrassed and it made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I've seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust was for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death. Now you will con me. Con not, that thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right. — Ernest Hemingway,

That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians. — Ernest Hemingway,

Every true story ends in death. — Ernest Hemingway,

Only suckers worry. But he can knock the worry if he takes a Scotch and soda. The hell with what the doctor says. So he rings for one and the steward comes sleepily, and as he drinks it, the speculator is not a sucker now; except for death. — Ernest Hemingway,

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. — Ernest Hemingway,

Good-by,'! he said to all those who were kneeling. 'Don't be said. To die is nothing. The only bad thing is to die at the hands of this canalla. — Ernest Hemingway,

Death is like an old whore in a bar
I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her — Ernest Hemingway,

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

All stories, if continued far enough, end in death. — Ernest Hemingway,

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing. — Tim Cahill

Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' Then he added, 'Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is. — Ernest Hemingway,

[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954) — Ernest Hemingway,

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. — Ernest Hemingway,

I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it. — Ernest Hemingway,

The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon - as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there - like pebbles cooled in a river. — Naomi Wood

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

Hemingway reached over and took Elsie's hand. "Do you know Dylan Thomas? I have always admired his take on death. Like he, I intend to go raging against the dying of the light." "Dear, — Homer Hickam

Any form of betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final. — Ernest Hemingway,

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. — Ernest Hemingway,

He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.
All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped. — Ernest Hemingway,

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. — Ernest Hemingway,

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist. — Mordecai Richler

Let us sleep, he said and 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,

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes. — Ernest Hemingway,

Anyone who had died young after a happy childhood had won a great victory, since he would be forever spared the discovery of what sort of place the world really is. Others must look forward to death by defeat - their bodies gone, their world destroyed. — Carlos Baker

I don't think I have even achieved fame. Of course, Hemingway says that fame is death's little sister. — Kinky Friedman

He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.
(The Capital of the World) — Ernest Hemingway,

Thou askest me to take things seriously? After what thou didst last night? When thou needest to kill a man and instead did what you did? You were supposed to kill one, not make one! When we have just seen the sky full of airplanes of a quantity to kill us back to our grandfathers and forward to all unborn grandsons including all cats, goats and bedbugs. Airplanes making a noise to curdle the milk in your mother's breasts as they pass over darkening the sky and roaring like lions and you ask me to take things seriously. I take them too seriously already. — Ernest Hemingway,

Death Anyway meant "What the hell, even Hemingway sucked on a shotgun ... " Death Anyway, when you came down to it, meant why in God's name would you want to be Pre-Law, Pre-Med, or Pre-Anything, when any microbe could see that just being alive was no more than Pre-Death.( ... ) That was the world, to me. If you showed up - if you did what they told you to do - you'd still end up with your skull in bloody gauze or your balls hanging from a branch. So why bother? Nothing mattered. Death anyway ... — Jerry Stahl