Quotes By Person: Ernest Hemingway

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

-Ernest Hemingway

Recommended by khrystian.

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“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

-Ernest Hemingway

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“What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and man was nothing to. [...] Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was all nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who are in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

-A Clean, Well Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway

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“'I don't love much.'

'Yes,' he said. 'You do. What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.'

'I don't love.'

'You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy.'

'I'm happy. I've always been happy.'

'It is another thing. You cannot know about it unless you have it.'”

-A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

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“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

-A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

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“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.”

-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

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“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”

-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

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“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

-Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway

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“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

-Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter, Ernest Hemingway

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“At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and the talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.”

-Soldier's Home, Ernest Hemingway

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“Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett. Everything of which he could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon.”

-The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

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