1,349 Quotes by Ernest Hemingway

Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer

A cat has absolute honesty.

My only regret in life is that I did not drink more wine.

There is no rule on how to write.

Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places.

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.