Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?

No. Hieronymus Bosch. Very old-timer. Very good. Pieter Brueghel worked on that too.

Really cheerful people are usually the bravest...

As he had originally planned to do, Hemingway took the external details of the story and presented them from the point of view of the fisherman. He thus made it possible for the reader to participate imaginatively in the story. That effect was always Hemingway's primary aim as a writer.

Es un oficio bastante malo,' he repeated, 'loving me.' 'Yes. But it is the only one I have.' 'Don't you write any more poetry?' 'It was young girl poetry. Like young girl painting. Everyone is talented at a certain age.' At what age do you become old in this country, the Colonel thought. No one is ever old in Venice, but they grow up very fast. I grew up very rapidly in the Veneto myself and I was never as old as I was at twenty-one.

Wilson looked at them both. If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?

in weakness, a man can present a great danger

How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She's damn cruel but they're all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes.

They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can't know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.

on je volio razmišljati o svemu što proživljava a kako nije imao što ?itati niti je imalo radio, mnogo je razmišljao i nastavio je razmišljati i o grijehu. Nisi ti ubio ribu samo da preživiš i da je prodaš na tržnici, pomisli. Ubio si je iz ponosa i zato što si ribar. Volio si je dok je bila živa, i volio si je i poslije toga. Ako je voliš, nije grijeh ubiti je. Ili je možda zato još ve?i grijeh?

You know. Don't pretend you don't know.

Pobre todo el mundo —dijo Hadley—. Ricos los gatos que no tienen dinero.

And what happened?' 'Much,' the woman said. 'Much. And all of it ugly. Even that which was glorious.

The bill always comes

No," Pablo said, dipping up another cup. "I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.

But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. How do you get through nights if you can't sleep? I guess you find out like you find out how it feels to lose your husband. I guess you find out all right. I guess you find out everything in this goddamned life.

How did you go bankrupt? Bill asked. Two ways, Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.

No. Rien à faire. Rien. Faut pas penser. Faut accepter.

Take it back. Sure. Anything. I never heard of Brett Ashley. How's that? No. Not that. About me going to hell. Oh, don't go to hell, I said. Stick around. We're just starting lunch.

it is always a mistake to know an author

Sad nije vrijeme da razmišljaš o onome što ti fali. Radije razmišljaj o tome šta možeš s onim što imaš.

Non c'è nulla di nobile nell'essere superiore a qualcun altro. La vera nobiltà consiste nell'essere superiore a chi eravamo ieri.

it in those days.

There was a great deal of material that Hemingway wrote for A Moveable Feast that he decided to leave out, acting "by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.