Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

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.

Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.

You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

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.

Are you a communist? No I am an anti-fascist For a long time? Since I have understood fascism.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

My big fish must be somewhere.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether they can read or write or not and whether they are alive or dead.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. There is nothing worse than war. Defeat is worse. I do not believe it, Passini said still respectfully. What is defeat? You go home.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

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.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.