Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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501 Quotes for Timeless Wisdom on Love, Happiness, and Writing

“No one you love is ever truly lost.”

“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”

“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

“I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.”

“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.”

“It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.”

“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”

“The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.”

“Everyone behaves badly--given the chance.”

“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.”

“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy. But since I am not, I do not care.”

“You've such a lovely temperature.”

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

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

“This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it”

“Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

“You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me.”

“Listen," I told him. "Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.”

“This is a good place," he said.
"There's a lot of liquor," I agreed.”

“I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.”

“It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”

“Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad.”

“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”

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

“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”

“Any man's life, told truly, is a novel…”

“My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.”

“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.”

“Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.”

“Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.”

“When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.”

“Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.”

“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”

“it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.”

“Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn't help it.”

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”

“I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.”

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

“I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.”

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

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."”

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

“Fish," he said softly, aloud, "I'll stay with you until I am dead.”

“Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary…”

“The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without”