Valevgale > Valevgale's Quotes

“After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

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

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Wild Years

“All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Religion is the opium of the poor”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If my Valentine you won't be,
I'll hang myself on your Christmas tree.”
― Ernest Hemingway, 88 Poems

“Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.”
― Ernest Hemingway

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

“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity. ”
― Anais Nin

“I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.”
― Anais Nin

“Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only.
She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious.”
― Anais Nin

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”
― Francis Bacon

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”
― Anais Nin

“The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”
― Anais Nin

“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.”
― Anais Nin

“The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”
― Anais Nin

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anais Nin

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake...”
― Sir Francis Bacon