“Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. Also, he had much bad luck, and it was not all of it his own. He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times. Nick could not write about him yet, although he would, later,”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.
Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Everything good he had ever written he'd made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn't understand. They thought it was all experience. Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he had never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“He had already learned there was only one day at a time and that is was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
“Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any farther today. He”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Nick Adams Stories
Ernest Hemingway
Born place: in Oak Park, Illinois, The United States
Born date July 21, 1899
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“Everything is in the way the material is composed.”
― Joseph O'Connor, quote from Star of the Sea
“This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth. The most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one perpetuated by the Islanders themselves, for as Dickens observed after his visit to this country, “These Americans do love a scoundrel.” Because his informants tend to imagine that the darkest interpretation is the one the writer wishes to hear, the popular accounts (until now, there have been no others) are invariably sensational as well as speculative: the hard facts, not to speak of “truth,” are missing. Also, this “Bloody Watson” material relates only to his final years in southwest Florida; one rarely encounters any reference to South Carolina, where Edgar Artemas Watson passed his boyhood, nor to the years in the Indian Country (always excepting his alleged role in the slaying of Belle Starr), nor even to the Fort White district of Columbia County in north Florida where he farmed in early manhood, married all three of his wives, and spent almost half of the fifty-five years of his life.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from Shadow Country
“Non lavorava come chi lavora per vivere, ma come qualcuno che non abbia altro scopo che lavorare, giudicandosi zero come uomo vivente e desiderando essere considerato solo in quanto artefice, che per il resto se ne va in giro modesto e insignificante, come un attore senza trucco, che non è nulla finchè non ha nulla da interpretare. Lavorava silenzioso, appartato, invisibile e pieno di disprezzo per quei mediocri che consideravano il genio un ornamento mondano e, poveri o ricchi che fossero, andavano in giro arruffati e cenciosi, o ricercavano il lusso con eccentriche cravatte, e insomma erano convinti di menare una vita insuperabilmente felice, affascinante e artistica; senza sapere che le opere di valore nascono solo sotto il premere di una vita cattiva, che colui che vive non lavora e che, per essere perfetti creatori, bisogna essere morti.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Tonio Kröger
“So much for the Emperor; the rest of this history must deal with the Monster.
—IV:22”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars
“Grandma being possessed by a murderous demon from hell makes perfect sense to me,”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Awaken
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