Ernest Hemingway

“Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.”

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

“Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.”

“And chase hard and good and with no mistakes and do not overrun them.”

“You roll back to me.”

“And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.”

“If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.”

“But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.”

“Nobody likes to life anchors.”

“They are not sorrows, so much as terrible things.”

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

“The bulls are my best friends."I translated to Brett."You kill your friends?" she asked."Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.”

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

“Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.”

“Heresy is the foe of countenance”

“Quando começou o Inverno, a chuva tornou-se permanente, e com a chuva veio a cólera. Mas foi dominada, e só matou sete mil homens do exército.”

“Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...”

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.Think of what you can do with that there is”

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.”

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)”

“I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time...”

“Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet.”

“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone”

“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

“He can't have gone, he said "Christ know he can't have gone. He's making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and her remembers something of it." The he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy.”

“The two waiters inside the cafe knew that theo ld man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.Why?"He was in despair."What about?"Nothing."How do you know it was nothing."He has plenty of money.”

“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.”

“Blow, blow, ye western wind . . . Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me.”

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”

“Good writing is good conversation, only more so.”

“Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.”

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.”

“A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”

“It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”

“I am always in love.”

“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.”

“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”

“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.”

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

“I even read aloud the part of the novel I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.When they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has," I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.”

“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”

“World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”