Ernest Hemingway
Master of understated prose, Nobel laureate
Most quoted
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
— from A Farewell to Arms, 1929
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you have finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
— from Death in the Afternoon, 1964
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
— from Death in the Afternoon (posthumously published preface), 1964
All quotes by Ernest Hemingway (235)
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
All of a sudden I realized I was in love with her.
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
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.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
I had learned already that a good writer does not need to be a clever writer. He needs to be a true writer.
You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I left it reluctantly.
The rain was still coming down, but it was a fine rain now, not a heavy rain.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
You belong to me and I belong to you.
I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted was to get out of it.
I am trying to write the best story I have ever written.
Contemporaries of Ernest Hemingway
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961).