207 quotes
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write.
A Letter from Cuba (1934)
'Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.'
'You think so?'
'I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.'
The Garden of Eden (1986)
'What happens to people that love each other?'
'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.'
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.
Islands in the Stream (1970)
You're my religion. You're all I've got.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
The best sky was in Italy and Spain and northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba.
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.
Never confuse movement with action.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.
Papa Hemingway (1966)
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Notes on the Next War (1935)
Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.
True at First Light (1999)