Quotes from Ernest Hemingway

Leave me with my memories. With my true, beautiful memories.

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman.

They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations.

I wish I had the boy.

He whispered this last so low that it was inaudible to anyone that did not love you.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

If you ever live to be as old as I am you will find many things strange." "You never seem old." "It is the body that is old. Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk. And the spirit is no older and not much wiser." "You are wise." "No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." "Perhaps that is wisdom." "It is a very unattractive wisdom.

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.

Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another. -- Hemingway's advice to other young writers in A Moveable Feast.

Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky.