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In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

— Ernest Hemingway True at First Light (1999)

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More quotes by Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Green Hills of Africa (1935)

In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

A Moveable Feast (1964)

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, no matter how justified, is not a crime.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ernest Hemingway (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.