Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

She did not like to hear the really bad nor tragic things, but no one does, and having seen them I did not care to talk about them unless she wanted to know how the world was going. She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad.

When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was. I knew that it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel.

Por qué madrugaremos tanto los viejos? ¿Será para alargar el día?

Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.

I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.

Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.

the clasp of the gold chain

Bed is my friend

there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found...

Todos precisam ter alguém para conversar - disse a mulher. - Antes, tínhamos a religião e outras coisas sem sentido. Agora, cada um precisa ter com quem falar abertamente. Pois quanto mais bravura alguém tiver, mais solitário vai ficando.

Still one does not forget people because they are dead...

Kui kergeks küll muutub süda, kui tead, et kõik on läbi, kui tead, et oled võidetud.

Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean happiness of can mean the end of the world.

No es cobardía saber lo que es insensato. —Ni es insensato saber lo que es cobardía —dijo Anselmo, incapaz de resistir la tentación de hacer una frase.

Le garçon vit que le vieil homme respirait, puis il vit les mains du vieil homme et il se mit à pleurer. Il sortit très doucement pour aller chercher du café et pleura tout le long du chemin.

I would always rather not know. Then, no matter what can happen, it was not me that talked.

I could not fail myself and die on a fish like this, he said. Now that I have him coming so beautifully, God help me endure. I'll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now.

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.

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope), he thought and so you had better take what time there is and be very thankful for it.

Make it all up. But make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. Ernest Hemingway

YOU DO NOT know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly.

So we sat and thought deeply for awhile.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.

He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.