Ernest Hemingway · 650 pages
Rating: (31.1K votes)
“My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare, señor. That’s rare and valuable.”
— Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Short Stories ”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“You don't have to destroy me. Do you? ...”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“I don't like to leave anything,' the man said. 'I don't like to leave things behind.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“I do not need to get used to your silence. I already know it. I quite possibly love all of it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“You bitch,' he said. 'You rich bitch. That's poetry. I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
'It's a bore,' he said out loud.
'What is, my dear?'
'Anything you do too bloody long.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“If you have to go away,' she said,'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? ...”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.'
'What did you say?'
'I said we could have everything.'
'We can have everything.'
'No, we can't.'
'We can have the whole world.'
'No, we can't.'
'We can go everywhere.'
'No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore.'
'It's ours.'
'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarreled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it . . . . How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman that looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he could never cure himself of loving her.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“I wanted it so much. I don’t know why I wanted it so much.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“Do you feel better?' he asked.
'I feel fine,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“If I do it you won't ever worry?'
'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.'
"Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“Be a damn fire eater now. He'd seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“You're remembering well today,' she said. 'Don't do it too much.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but always what he could do.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.
All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“And this,' he was saying aloud. 'And this. And this.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
Ernest Hemingway
Born place: in Oak Park, Illinois, The United States
Born date July 21, 1899
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“We all know about Katie’s dead”
― quote from Breathless
“Nazi persecution didn’t limit itself to race. Religion, national origin, alternative lifestyles, persons with disabilities—all were targets. How would you characterize the Slavs? Gypsies? Moors? All the lines get blurred. Even within Judaism, there are many races. There are Negro Jews in Ethiopia and Middle Eastern Jews in Iraq. There have been Jews in Japan since the 1860s. Poland was fractionally Jewish, but there were still three and a half million Jews living there in the 1930s.” “But still, today it all seems so incomprehensible.” Ben raised his eyebrows. “Incomprehensible because we’re Americans? Land of the free and home of the brave? Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve authored our own chapters in the history of shame, periods where the world looked at us and shook its head. Early America built an economy based on slavery and it was firmly supported by law. Read the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. We trampled entire cultures of Native Americans. ‘No Irish Need Apply’ was written on factory gates in nineteenth-century New York.” Ben shook his head. “We’d like to think we’re beyond such hatred, but the fact is, we can never let our guard down. That’s why this case is so important. To you and to me. It’s another reminder of what can happen when evil is allowed to incubate. Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture, to denigrate a people because they’re different, and it’s not such a giant leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter.” Catherine”
― Ronald H. Balson, quote from Once We Were Brothers
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― William T. Sherman, quote from Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman
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