Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.

I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.

The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.

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

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

Take a good rest, small bird, he said. Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.

Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it's over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that's rare, señor. That's rare and valuable." — Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Short Stories 

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

There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.

My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

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.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

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.

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

The bulls are my best friends. I translated to Brett. You kill your friends? she asked. Always, he said in English, and laughed. So they don't kill me.

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.