Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

You ought to dream.

It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

But, thank God, [the fish] are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

And that was the end of the beginning of that

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

You never understand anybody that loves you.

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

To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the cafe.

I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night. Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.

Where should we go?" "I don't care. Anywhere you want. Anywhere we don't know people.

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

All things truly wicked start from innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.

That's all we do, isn't it -- look at things and try new drinks?

The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. Then he smiled.

Every one needs to talk to some one, the woman said. Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.

Anyone can be a fisherman in May.

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.