Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn.

I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. 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, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.

I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.

It had been wonderful and they had been truly happy and he had not known that you could love anyone so much that you cared about nothing else and other things seemed inexistent.

If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them

He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run.

Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world, and I loved him like you love God.

We can't ever go back to old things or try and get the "old kick" out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.

I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.

I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.

You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?

No. Have it here where it is quiet. You and your quiet, said Brett. What is it men feel about quiet? We like it, said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear.

However you make your living is where your talent lies

Age is my alarm clock," the old man said. "Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?

There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion.

I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was a Château Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.

You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.

It came very fast and the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in it and it was snow.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

I still need some more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.

I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into.

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

Even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.