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 HemingwayIโm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life acrossโnot to just depict lifeโor criticize itโbut to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You canโt do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you canโt believe in it. Things arenโt that way.
Ernest HemingwayNobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.
Ernest HemingwayWhat I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don't even know they have it โ that's in the first reader for squares โ is, no matter how they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.
Ernest Hemingway