Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

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.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

They are strong,” David said. ”But there’s a strong wind today and we drink according to the wind.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.' She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

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.

I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?

I wanted it so much. I don’t know why I wanted it so much.

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

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.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.