Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

I thought you weren't going to ever talk about it. How can I help it? You'll lose it if you talk about it. I just talk around it. You know I feel rather damned good, Jake. You should. You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. Yes. It's sort of what we have instead of God. Some people have God, I said. Quite a lot. He never worked very well with me. Should we have another Martini?

Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.

I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone

What happens to people that love each other? - I suppose they have whatever they have, and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness forever.

Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.' She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story. (Interview with Paris Review , 1958)

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone.

The best sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern Michigan in the fall

There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it…

I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

Blow, blow, ye western wind . . . Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me.

I only like two other things; one is bad for my work and the other is over in half an hour or fifteen minutes. Sometimes less. Sometimes a good deal less.

Memory is hunger.

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

I never trust frank and simple people whose stories hold together.

Please tell me what can I do. There must be something I can do

I shouldn't have gone out so far, fish," he said. "Neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish.

He thought that he would lie down and think about nothing. Sometimes he could do this. Sometimes he could think about the stars without wondering about them and the ocean without problems and the sunrise without what it would bring.

The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

During the night two porpoises came around the boat and he could hear them rolling and blowing. He could tell the difference between the blowing noise the male made and the sighing blow of the female. 'They are good,' he said. 'They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish.