“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
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“Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Imagination
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“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Intelligence
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“The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sports
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“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Morality
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“Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it–although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“Courage is grace under pressure.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Courage
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“A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Comedy
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“I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“The world is a fine place worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: World
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“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
Ernest Hemingway
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
