Ernest Hemingway citations

Page 14

“Laissons le croire que je suis plus homme que moi et je le serai alors.”

“Faites toujours sobre ce que vous avez dit que vous feriez quand vous étiez ivre. Cela vous apprendra à vous taire !”

“Il n'y a rien de noble à être supérieur à son prochain; la vraie noblesse est d'être supérieur à votre ancien moi.”

“Nous avons bien mangé pour pas trop cher, et nous avons bien bu pour pas trop cher et nous avons dormi bien au chaud ensemble et nous nous sommes aimés.”

“Un homme intelligent est parfois forcé d'être ivre pour passer du temps avec ses imbéciles.”

“Nul homme n’est une île en soi. Nous faisons tous partie d’un continent et chaque fois que tu entends sonner le glas, ne demande pas pour qui il sonne, il sonne pour toi."
--Ernest Hemingway, “Pour qui sonne le glas”?”

“Grace under pressure.”

“Dans la vie, il faut [d'abord] durer.”

“Le lendemain matin, le gamin entr'ouvrit la porte et passa la tête. Le vieux dormait toujours. Le temps était trop mauvais pour que les bateaux pussent sortir; aussi le gamin avait-il dormi tard. Comme les matins précédents, il était venu. D'abord, il s'assura que le vieux respirait. Ensuite il vit les mains et pleura. Sans bruit il sortit et courut chercher du café. Il pleurait en dévalant la côte.”

“Comme apparence, il avait un des visages les plus laids qu'on puisse trouver hors d'une cage à singes, un corps assez bien, mûr, mais aux jointures plutôt épaisses, et l'air content de soi d'un acteur en vogue.”

“La mort est un remède souverain à toutes les infortunes.”

“C'est en voyant la femelle du taureau de combat qu'on saisit le plus clairement la différence entre l'animal sauvage et l'animal domestique.”

“On était à présent dans la saison des ouragans; quand il n'y a pas d'ouragan en train, c'est le plus beau temps de l'année.”

“Ça m'empêchera pas de le tuer, dit-il; tout superbe et formidable qu'il soit.”

“C'est seulement par sa conduite sous la pique que l'on peut juger et apprécier la bravoure d'un taureau; et la bravoure c'est la racine du taureau espagnol.”

“Les premières étoiles se montraient. […] bientôt toutes ses amies lointaines parsèmeraient le ciel. - Le poisson aussi est mon ami, dit-il tout haut. […] Pourtant faut que je le tue. Heureusement qu'on est pas obligé de tuer les étoiles!”

“Dans tous les arts, le plaisir croît avec la connaissance que l'on a d'eux.”

“Dans la cabane, là-bas, tout en haut, le vieux s'était rendormi. Il gisait toujours sur le ventre. Le gamin, assis à côté de lui, le regardait dormir. Le vieux rêvait de lions.”

“No. Rien à faire. Rien. Faut pas penser. Faut accepter.”

“Si vous avez la chance d’avoir vécu jeune homme à Paris, où que vous alliez pour le reste de votre vie, cela ne vous quitte pas, car Paris est une fête.”

“Le pis c'est quand vous êtes séparé d'un ami par l'esprit.”

“Tu sais, Papa, que les femmes pleurent comme les enfants pissent?”

“Tu es ma religion. Tu es tout ce que j'ai.”

“Voulez-vous s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît s'il vous plaît arrêter de parler?”

“Pound est fou. Tous les poètes le sont…. Ils doivent l'être.”

“Écrivez avec force et avec clarté ce qui fait mal.”

“Non, c'est le grand sophisme: la sagesse des vieillards. Ils ne deviennent pas sages. Ils deviennent prudents.”

“Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.
This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.”

“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”

“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”

“Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.”

“Tell me some true things about fighting.'
'Tell me you love me.'
'I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.”

“Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself.”

“Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”

“Darling, would you like to grow a beard?'
'Would you like me to?'
'It might be fun. I'd like to see you with a beard.'
'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.”

“Easy writing makes hard reading.”

“We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

“Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.”

“When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.”

“Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.”

“The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever…Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”

“It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank.”

“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.”

“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.”

“I didn't marry her family.'
'Of course not. But you always do. Dead or alive.”

“A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can. He can only feel it and hear the crowd's reaction to it. When he feels it and knows that it is great it takes hold of him so that nothing else in the world matters. All the time that he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and his knowledge of the animal. Those matadors are called cold who visibly show that they are thinking of this. Antonio was not cold and the public belonged to him now. He looked up at them and let them know, modestly but not humbly, that he knew it and as he circled the ring with the ear in his hand he looked at the different segments of Bilbao, a city that he loved, as they stood up as he passed and was happy that he owned them.”

“Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”

“But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.”

“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”

“Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?"”

“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”

“We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves.”

“It’s his sense of self-preservation.’ ‘The great Italian sense.’ ‘The greatest Italian sense.”

“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”

“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.”

“To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.”