Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die.

Thank you very much," the girl said. "You know that another woman, or a woman in memory, is a terrible thing for a young girl to deal with when she is still without experience.

It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Anything was better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon...

In a snowstorm it always seemed, for a time, as though there were no enemies.

Do you want to keep your knee, young man?' 'No', I said. 'What?' 'I want it cut off,' I said, 'so I can wear a hook on it.

I told the boy I was a strange old man," he said. "Now is when I must prove it.

It evidently made no difference whether I was there to look after things or not.

I am asking Scribners to insert as a subtitle in everything after the eighth printing THE SUN ALSO RISES (LIKE YOUR COCK IF YOU HAVE ONE) A greater Gatsby (Written with the friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Prophet of THE JAZZ AGE)

We made love and then made love again and then after we had made love once more, quiet and dark and unspeaking and unthinking and then like a shower of meteors on a cold night, we went to sleep.

He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life. You've had as good a life as any one because of these last days. You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I've learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end.

He looked at the sky and saw the white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice cream and high above were the thin feathers of the cirrus against the high September sky.

Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.

Oh, go to hell. He stood up from the table his face white, and stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors d' Å"uvres. Sit down, I said. Don't be a fool. You've got to take that back. Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff. Take it back. Sure. Anything. I never heard of Brett Ashley. How's that? No. Not that. About me going to hell. Oh, don't go to hell, I said. Stick around. We're just starting lunch.

I always shot scorpions with the .22 pistol.

A töprengés éppoly veszedelmes, mint a félelem.

Inside the closed double lip of his jaws all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man's fingers when they are crisped like claws.

You find everything on earth at Harry's. Yes, my Colonel. Except, possibly, happiness. I'll damn well find happiness, too, the Colonel assured him. Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.

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.

You know the only thing I've ever lost is curiosity, he said to her. You've never lost anything.You're the most complete man I've ever known