Ernest Hemingway citations

Page 16

“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.”

“All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.”

“One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.”

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people…. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.”

“A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.”

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition”

“War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”

“Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though.
How do you know that? he asked himself. Going away can be final. Walking out the door can be final. Any form of real betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.”

“But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women - that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.”

“[W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.”

“The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.”

“[T]he rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear.”

“If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”

“Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?… The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”

“I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot, i. e., loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better), you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.”

“I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.”

“Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying.”

“To be a successful father … there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.”

“Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.”

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”

“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”

“In life, one must (first) last.”

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon.”

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

“Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.”

“Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.”