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

“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

“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

“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

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

“I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?”
― 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

“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

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

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

“When spring came, even 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”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“On Hemingway: Have you noticed how lonely all people in his works are - no relatives, no family?”
― Anna Akhmatova

“But then we did not think ever of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich. It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm. It only seemed odd to rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

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

“There is not much future in men being friends with a great woman although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty... The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“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

“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“The one who is doing the work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one poverty is hard on.

Heminway talking about his wife Hadley”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“She had the lovely high cheekbones for arrogance.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

- about Wyndham Lewis”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“But this Hemingway stuff is what really has me down."
"A gag," I said. "An old, old gag."
"Who is this Hemingway person at all?"
"A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good."
"That must take a hell of a long time," the big man said.”
― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“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 and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“And the window shutting. Marie, his femme de ménage, protesting against the eight-hour day saying, 'If a husband works until six he gets only a little drunk on the way home and does not waste too much. If he works only until five he is drunk every night and has no money. It is the wife of the working man who suffers from this shortening of hours.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories