Ernest Hemingway: Thing (page 2)

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

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

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

“You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?”

“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.”

“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”

“Out of all the things you could not have there were some things that you could have and one of those was to know when you were happy and to enjoy all of it while it was there and it was good.”

“I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.”

“And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.”

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

“Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”

“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”

“I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time…”

“The shortest answer is doing the thing.”

“The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.”

“There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light.”

“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”

“He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.”

“Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.”