Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“All men fear death. It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same. However, when you make love with a truly great woman, one that deserves the utmost respect in this world and one that makes you feel truly powerful, that fear of death completely disappears. Because when you are sharing your body and heart with a great woman the world fades away. You two are the only ones in the entire universe. You conquer what most lesser men have never conquered before, you have conquered a great woman’s heart, the most vulnerable thing she can offer to another. Death no longer lingers in the mind. Fear no longer clouds your heart. Only passion for living, and for loving, become your sole reality. This is no easy task for it takes insurmountable courage. But remember this, for that moment when you are making love with a woman of true greatness you will feel immortal.
I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know or Belmonte, who is truly brave, it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds. Until it returns, as it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.”
― Woody Allen

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. 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. 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.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
“Elton John?”
“Close. Ernest Hemingway. In his own way, sort of the rock star of his time.”
― Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures

“When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.”
― 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

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
― 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

“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.”
― Tiffany Madison

“I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

“Some websites accepted each quote we create”
― Ernest Hemingway

“This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories

“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy,' he said aloud. 'But since I am not crazy, I do not care.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“I am speaking much. But it is so we may understand one another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You ought to write, he told himself. Maybe you will again some time.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“But there was a thing here that I never saw. I don't think you've ever seen it either. There were Americans came here and they put whiskey in the beer."

"No," I said.

"Oui. My God, yes, that's true. Et aussi une femme qui a vomis sur la table!"

"Comment?"

"C'est vrai. Elle a vomis sur la table. Et après elle a vomis dans ses shoes. And afterward they come back and say they want to come again and have another party the next Saturday, and I say no, my God, no! When they came I locked the door.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The world break everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms & For Whom the Bell Tolls: World War 1&2 Novels

“Marriage would wreck us. Both of us...I'm sorry. It's just not right for me.'
'Don't you love me?'
'Of course I love you. But that doesn't mean I want to marry you.”
― Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway

“He lives forever in his words, in his poems, and in his stories. An inspiration to many writers and poets all around the world. The man who became immortal by his words, the one and only - Ernest Hemingway.”
― Avijeet Das

“Ernest Hemingway was right—there is a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in.

Let warmth touch your wound; let your pain cleanse you in all its entirety.”
― Felisa Tan, In Search for Meaning