Hemingway Quotes

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I am always in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy’s aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”
― Earnest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's the Old Man and the Sea

“wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg”
― Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.”
― Elmore Leonard

“Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“that every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery”
― Ernest Hemingway

“In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?”
― Bridie Clark, Because She Can

“When words fail, the hammer drops,
living can never be its own excuse.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?"
"Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.”
― John Grisham, Camino Island

“I even read aloud the part of the novel I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.
When they said, 'It's great, Ernest. Truly, it's great. You cannot know the thing it has," I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some attractive stick back, instead of thinking, 'If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?' That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“for all the poor in the world against all tyranny”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Madame, it is always a mistake to know an author. (p.215)”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“A Tom Sawyerish figure she imagined growing up on some widwestern farm, reading adventure books and butchering chickens, pulling the braids of milkmaids and leaving his hometown to travel the world; a more devout and sober Hemingway, in search of a deeper meaning, but never losing sight of where he came from.”
― Susie Yang, In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology

“...all people, no matter how little they had, if in Paris, they possessed great treasure...Paris itself.”
― Robert Wheeler, Hemingway's Paris

“There is no better city than Paris in which to love. There is no worse city than Paris in which to love and to lose.”
― Robert Wheeler

“If the bulls were allowed to increase their knowledge as the bullfighter does, and if those bulls which are not killed in the allotted fifteen minutes in the ring were not afterwards killed in the corrals but were allowed to be fought again, they would kill all the bullfighters, if the bullfighters fought them according to the rules- Bullfighting is based on the fact that it is the first meeting between the wild animal and a dismounted man. This is the fundamental premise of modern bullfighting—that the bull has never been in the ring before. In the early days of bullfighting bulls were allowed to be fought which had been in the ring before and so many men were killed in the bull ring that on 20th November 1567, Pope Pius the Fifth issued a Papal edict excommunicating all Christian princes who should permit bullfights in their countries and denying Christian burial to any person killed in the bull ring. The Church only agreed to tolerate bullfighting, which continued steadily in Spain in spite of the edict, when it was agreed that the bulls should only appear once in the ring.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Works of Ernest Hemingway

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“And the window shutting. Marie, his femme de ménage, protesting against the eight-hour day saying, 'If a husband works until six he gets only a little drunk on the way home and does not waste too much. If he works only until five he is drunk every night and has no money. It is the wife of the working man who suffers from this shortening of hours.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

“I read twenty-five pages out loud. Eve fell asleep after ten. I suppose I could have stopped, but I was enjoying the book. Starting on page 104 made Hemingway's prose even more energetic than usual. Without the early chapters, all the incidents became sketches and all the dialogue innuendo. Bit characters stood on equal footing with the central subjects and positively bludgeoned them with disinterested common sense. The protagonists didn't fight back. They seemed relieved to be freed from the tyranny of their tale. It made me want to read all of Hemingway's books this way.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility