“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.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Good dialogue is not real speech-it’s the illusion of real speech.”
“It’s harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.”
“If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
“Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.”
“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
“War is not won by victory.”
“God knows I didn’t mean to fall in love with her.”
“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.”
“There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.”
“That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.”
“Ascensions into heaven are like falling leaves sad and happy all at the same time Going away isn’t really sad especially when your going enables a new kind of presence to be born.”
“You’ve such a lovely temperature.”
“Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.”
“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.”
“I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.”
“There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.”
“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”
“God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.”
“He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled...”
“The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”
“I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.”
“The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.”
“I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.”
“All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn’t care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.”
“I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.”
“All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”
“In war, one cannot say what one feels.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.”
“Creation’s probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.”
“I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.”
“Your blood coagulates beautifully.”
“But I think the Great DiMaggio would be proud of me today.”
“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.”
“Keep right on lying to me. That’s what I want you to do.”
“I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.”
“And who understands? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all.”
“Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.”
“Let’s not talk about how I am. It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.”
“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
“The cat has complete emotional honesty – an attribute not often found in humans.”
“Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long.”
“Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.”
“Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.”
“No one ever stopped when they were winning.”
“What I learned constructive about women is that no matter how old they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had.”
“I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.”
“The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.”
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