"It is silly not to hope, besides I believe it is a sin." The Old Man and the Sea"
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Quote collection
Ernest Hemingway quotes (page 28 of 40)
798 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after."
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"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."
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"The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it."
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"The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert."
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"Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action."
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"Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved."
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"Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence."
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"Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly."
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"In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector."
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"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."
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"Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places."
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"Try and write straight English; never using slang except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable. Because all slang goes sour in a short time. I only use swear words, for example, that have lasted at least a thousand years for fear of getting stuff that will be simply timely and then go sour."
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"A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited."
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"Summer is a discouraging time to work - you don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper."
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"And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it."
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"Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse."
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"The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone."
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"Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you."
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"The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits."
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