Ernest Hemingway Quotes

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

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.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

I was blown up while we were eating cheese.

We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.

Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.

A person with increasing knowledge and sensory education may derive infinite enjoyment from wine.

Fascism is a lie told by bullies.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

We're stronger in the places that we've been broken.

You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.

I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.

It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house.

You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga.

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

Everybody has something wrong with them.

And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.' 'What did you say?' 'I said we could have everything.' 'We can have everything.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can have the whole world.' 'No, we can't.' 'We can go everywhere.' 'No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore.' 'It's ours.' 'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.

No horse named Morbid ever won a race.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngai', the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcas of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.