"And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all."
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Quote collection
Ernest Hemingway quotes (page 26 of 40)
798 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again."
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"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love."
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"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things"
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"Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary."
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"People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars."
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"The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges."
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"Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad."
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"When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes."
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"Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers."
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"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."
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"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."
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"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes."
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"The fish is my friend too...I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought"
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"This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other."
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"And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No"
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"It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea."
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"Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?"
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"I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful."
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"You know I don't love any one but you. You shouldn't mind because some one else loved me."
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