Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

The men ate seriously.

I've known a lot of gypsies and they are strange enough. But so are we. The difference is we have to make an honest living. Nobody knows what tribes we came from nor what our tribal inheritance is nor what the mysteries were in the woods where the people lived that we came from. All we know is that we do not know.

But I know many things I can't say.

Why we were born, if not to help each other? So, nothing to listen and nothing to speak is a very cold help.

Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.

You never look old. -The body is that which grows old. The spirit is neither older, nor much wiser.

To drink is nothing. It's important to be drunk.

He can't have gone," he said. "Christ knows he can't have gone. He's making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and he remembers something of it.

and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

He wants to in the whirl of his own weakness. But the river is coming. By being forced to change, he'll be powerful in change.

No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess now.

I had hoped for something. Defeat? No. Something more. There isn't anything more. Except victory. It may be worse.

Pray for anything you like, if it is for the good of us all. -I pray for beer, for meat and for a new wife with hard hands. You can share the wife.

That is the way a whore talks. A whore is also a woman, but I am not a whore. You'll be one. Not through you.

Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath.

French, the language of diplomacy. Spanish, the language of bureaucracy.

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness

Show irony and pity.

I don't know. I guess the cards we draw are those we get. You wouldn't like to re-deal would you, dealer? No. They only deal to you once and then you pick them up and play them. I can play them, if I draw any damn thing at all...

Just as she goes and watch for that no-good Minerva. Keep well inside of that and outside the sand-spits.

But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people ... and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything.

Together they made the bed with me in it. That was new to me and an admirable proceeding.