Hemingway Death 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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