Ernest Hemingway

I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.

He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.

I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.

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.

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

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