Ernest Hemingway
A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.Collection: Believe
I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.Collection: Writing
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?Collection: Order
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.Collection: Hurt
I don't like to leave anything,' the man said. 'I don't like to leave things behind.Collection: Men
Never fall in love?" "Always," said the count. "I am always in love.Collection: Falling In Love
Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.Collection: Heart
Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.Collection: War
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.Collection: Beach
I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.Collection: Lonely
The echoes of beauty you've seen transpire, Resound through dying coals of a campfire.Collection: Beauty
And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.Collection: Light
I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.Collection: Crazy
She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.Collection: Beautiful
Wine ... offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.Collection: Appreciation
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.Collection: Sports
You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.Collection: Trust
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.Collection: Life
Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it.Collection: Knowing
Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.Collection: Writing
You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.Collection: Spring
The smallest coffins are the heaviest.Collection: Coffins
Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.Collection: Retirement
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.Collection: Writing
Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.Collection: Honesty
At night, never go to bed without knowing what you'll write tomorrow.Collection: Writing
All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.Collection: Writing
The writer's job is to tell the truth.Collection: Jobs
The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats.Collection: Inspirational
Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.Collection: Bad Ass
The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.Collection: Art
As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.Collection: Wisdom
Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the windows open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be.Collection: Dark
The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.Collection: Writing
In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.Collection: Mistake
Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.Collection: Reading
You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.Collection: Father
Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.Collection: Art
But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope).Collection: Tonight
For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.Collection: Moving
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.Collection: Life
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.Collection: Wisdom
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.Collection: Writing
Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.Collection: Stupidity
But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.Collection: Trying
Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.Collection: Writing
Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . .Collection: Sea
You must hold hard to life and do it. But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it. Hold it tight.Collection: Men