Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

For what are we born if not to aid one another?

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.

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.

Death is like an old whore in a bar--I'll buy her a drink but I won't go upstairs with her

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. 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?

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 or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.

My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.

Never fall in love? Always, said the count. I am always in love.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Fish, he said softly, aloud, I'll stay with you until I am dead.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.