Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

with bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. but 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.

To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.

In those days you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit's foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket.

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty... The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

She had a gently modelled face and her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents.

He held them in his hand and looked at them as a man who was panning for gold, expecting only flakes, would look at four nuggets in his pan. The four bullets had black noses. Now the meat was out of them, the short twist rifling showed clearly. They were 9mm standard issue for the Schmeisser machine pistol. They made the man very happy. They picked up all the hulls, he thought. But they left these as plain as calling cards.

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for your to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was.

Messier service, messier life.

The man isn't born for defeats.He can fall from grace,but he cannot be defeated.

He must find things he cannot lose

It's gone the way the mist is burned off the hollows in broken ground when the sun comes out,' the Colonel said. 'And you're the sun.

When I was a little girl I didn't like the smell of the hops in the carts. Nor in the fields. Je n'aime pas les houblons. No, my God, not a bit. The man that owns the brewery said to me and my sister to go to the brewery and drink the beer, and then we'd like the hops. That's true. Then we liked them all right. He had them give us the beer. We liked them all right then.

All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.

While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

We both touched wood on the café table and the wait came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

Everyone needs to do what they can do, by how truly they can do.

We're all broken that's how the light gets in.

I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.

But she has a tongue that scalds and that bites like a bull whip. With this tongue she takes the hide from any one. She is of an unbelievable barbarousness.

The room they lived in looked like the painting of Van Gogh's room at Arles except there was a double bed and two big windows and you could look out across the water and the marsh and sea meadows to the white town and bright beach of Palavas.

Es mejor que la suerte te sorprenda cuando estás preparado.

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as on seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age.