Ernest Hemingway

“This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.”

“I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.”

“In those days, there was no money to buy books.”

“Live life to the fullest.”

“I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.”

“Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.”

“A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.”

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

“When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”

“He spat into the ocean and said, “Eat that, galanos. And make a dream you’ve killed a man.”

“She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.”

“That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all th things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing - the stream.”

“Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?”

“I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.”

“The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”

“He killed more men than the cholera.”

“I am an old man who will live until I die," Anselmo said.”

“Everything kills everything else in some way.”

“It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting.”

“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.”

“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”

“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.”

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

“I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.”

“My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”

“Nessun uomo è un'isola, completo in se stesso; ogni uomo è un pezzo del continente, una parte del tutto. Se anche solo una nuvola venisse lavata via dal mare, l'Europa ne sarebbe diminuita, come se le mancasse un promontorio, come se venisse a mancare una dimora di amici tuoi, o la tua stessa casa. La morte di qualsiasi uomo mi sminuisce, perché io sono parte dell'umanità. E dunque non chiedere mai per chi suona la campana: suona per te.”

“Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.”

“You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.”

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”

“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”

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

“This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”

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

“Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.”

“We're stronger in the places that we've been broken.”

“You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.”

“You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.”

“Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.”

“I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. ”

“He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.”

“Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.”

“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.That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought.”

“For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.”

“But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”

“There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”

“It is the fault of the orders, which are too rigid. There is no allowance for a change in circumstance.”

“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”

“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...”