Ernest Hemingway

“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

“I had gone...to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.”

“She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful. ‘Hello,’ I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me”

“He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run.”

“He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long, golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning.”

“Su decisión habia sido permanecer en aguas profundas y tenebrosas, lejos de todas las trampas y cebos y traiciones. Mi decisión fué ir allá a buscarlo, mas allá de toda gente. Mas allá de toda gente en el mundo. Ahora estamos solos uno para el otro y así ha sido desde mediodía. Y nadie que venga a valernos, ni a él ni a mí.”

“When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.”

“Ambition...the original of vices;Mother of hypocrisy, parent of envy, engineer of deceit”

“The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.”

“We are stronger in our broken places.”

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

“Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.”

“How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.”

“Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.”

“Love is a dunghill, and I'm the cock that gets on it to crow.”

“Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.”

“And just then it occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden, evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it.”

“He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”

“It's a bore," he said out loud."What is, my dear?""Anything you do too bloody long.”

“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.”

“I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”

“Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.”

“Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.”

“Si-apoi, se gândi batrânul, toata lumea omoara pe toata lumea într-un fel sau altul. Pescuitul ma omoara în aceeasi masura în care ma tine în viata.”

“In life, one must (first) last." (“Dans la vie, il faut [d'abord] durer.”)”

“My big fish must be somewhere.”

“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.”

“It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top. Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us to start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Every one took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.”

“For God sake write and don't worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what.I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

“El hombre que ha empezado a vivir seriamente por dentro, empieza a vivir más sencillamente por fuera”

“Any form of betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.”

“You'll lose it, if you talk about it”

“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.”

“I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls.”

“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.”

“A bottle of wine was good company.”

“He looked at his face carefully in the glass, put a big dab of lather on each cheek-bone. "It's an honest face. It's a face any woman would be safe with.""She'd never seen it.""She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face.”

“Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won’t you? Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

“She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things,”

“What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”

“It was an hour before the first shark hit him.”

“She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.”

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

“He used the word gamut.”

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

“Work could cure almost anything”

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”

“There is milk? What luxury!”

“Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.”