Hemingway Quotes

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I am always in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy’s aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. 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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

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

“Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”
― Earnest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's the Old Man and the Sea

“wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg”
― Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.”
― Elmore Leonard

“Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“that every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?”
― Bridie Clark, Because She Can

“When words fail, the hammer drops,
living can never be its own excuse.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?"
"Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.”
― John Grisham, Camino Island

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Madame, it is always a mistake to know an author. (p.215)”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“for all the poor in the world against all tyranny”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Hemingway once said that ‘there is nothing to writing, you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’ What Hemingway failed to mention is that bleeding is the easy part. To cut is what makes writing hard. Sitting down to write and hitting that first key or touching the tip of your pen to that blank sheet of paper - that’s the hard part. Once you start - once you spill that first bit of ink and let it bleed into the page, the rest takes care of itself. There’s nothing to it. You just sit there and bleed until it stops. It is not for this reason, but it’s still interesting and worth mentioning that the word ‘write’ comes from the Proto-Germanic word ‘writan,’ which literally meant to scratch, tear, or cut.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Kafka, Tolstoy, Plath, Hemingway, Neruda, and Rilke are all masters of writing. They are history. Read the writings of the present generation poets & writers, before they become history!”
― Avijeet Das

“Hemingway has an unquenchable thirst for women and war. You can feel satisfied knowing you’re the only one who gave him both.”
― Pamela L Hamilton, Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale

“Erst skeptisch, dann neugierig, im Golfstrom einen Schwertfisch am Haken - plötzlich im Banne Hemingways.”
― Wolf-Ulrich Cropp, Kuba, Hemingway, eine Cohiba + ich

“Dialogues with such inspiring idols as Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, E E Cummings, Rabindranath Tagore, Lakshmi Prasad Devkota, Ernest Hemingway in one's imagination is a way to keep the creative fire burning within the artist's soul.”
― Avijeet Das

“Preoccuparsi è dannoso come aver paura; serve solo a far le cose più difficili.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls