Quotes by Ernest Hemingway

“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”

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

“Every mans life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

“I never trust frank and simple people whose stories hold together.”

“People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

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

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

“I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima”

“But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasnt any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”

“Why, darling, I dont live at all when Im not with you.”

“I didnt want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and theres a lot of difference.”

“Thats my town, Joaquin said. What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war. Then, his face grave, There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister. What barbarians, Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, What barbarians.”

“Ive seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

“Im with you. No matter what else you have in your head Im with you and I love you.”

“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.”

“If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.”

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”