Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring… But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

I think perhaps I can too. But I try not to borrow. First you borrow. Then you beg.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.

Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.

The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.

Blood is thicker than water, The young man said As he knifed his friend For a drooling old bitch And a house full of lies.

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.

It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.

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

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

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

Grace under pressure.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

Do you always get so hungry when you make love?" "When you love somebody.

Strong in all the Broken Places