“Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”
Letter to Bernard Berenson (13 September 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
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Ernest Hemingway 501
American author and journalist 1899–1961Related quotes
While eating "Chicken of the Sea" canned tuna
Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica, "Newlyweds Clean House" [1.01], 19 August 2003
fr. 117
Variant translations:
Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden/A bush, a bird, and a fish with scales that gleam in the ocean.
tr. Jane Ellen Harrison
Purifications
Source: Harrison, Jane Ellen. (1903). Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Princeton University Press. p. 590.
Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Part of a statement at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society (30 May 1860), generally quoted in a simplified form omitting Holmes's exceptions including opium and anaesthetics.
Throw out opium, which the Creator himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in the cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to be fed there must also be a pain to be soothed; throw out a few specifics which our art did not discover, and it is hardly needed to apply; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica [medical drugs], as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes.
As quoted in a review of Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science (1860) in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. 40 (1860), p. 467 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zHdDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA467
Paraphrased variant: If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity.