Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

This is a bad life for good children

You lose them the same way your lose a battalion; by errors of judgment, orders that are impossible to fulfill, and through impossible conditions.

The bullfight is a Spanish institution; it has not existed because of the foreigners and tourists, but always in spite of them and any step to modify it to secure their approval, which it will never have, is a step towards its complete suppression.

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever.

I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

In the night he awoke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken away from him.

You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

There isn't any need to deny everything there's been just because you are going to lose it.

I could picture it. I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

The cider tasted like Michigan too and I always remembered the cider mill

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

What an excellent fish dolphin is to eat cooked, he said. And what a miserable fish raw. I will never go in a boat again without salt or limes.

The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see, the old man said. He noticed how pleasant it was to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to himself and to the sea.

I may not be as strong as I think,' the old man said, 'But I know many tricks and I have resolution.

Only suckers worry. But he can knock the worry if he takes a Scotch and soda. The hell with what the doctor says. So he rings for one and the steward comes sleepily, and as he drinks it, the speculator is not a sucker now; except for death.

In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unelated and he hated every one he saw.

I can't say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.

No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me.

Should I pity so and so? I asked. I gave his name but he delights so in giving it himself that I feel there is no need to give it for him. No. He's vicious. He's a corrupter and he's truly vicious. But he's supposed to be a good writer. He's not, she said. He's just a showman and he corrupts for the pleasure of corruption and he leads people into other vicious practices as well.

There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.

You bought me a beer," the old man said. "You are already a man.

How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.