This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.
Better | Courage | Good | Kill | Light | Loneliness | Love | Man | People | Time | Will | Wishes | World | Afraid |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I say that is wine, Brett held up her glass. We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.' This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste. Brett's glass was empty.
Right |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.
Right |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
When you have a child, the world has a hostage.
Ability | Character | Dignity | Enough | Experience | Good | Heart | Intelligence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Luck | Man | Men | People | Price | Science | Time | Will | Work | Writing | Luck | Learn | Old | Understand |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I thought I paid for everything. Not like women, pay and pay and pay. There is not a reward or punishment. Just exchange of values. Something comparable to, and in return you get something else. Or work for the sake of something. Anyway after all, at least partially good pay. Much of what I was paying, like me, and I had a good time. You pay either the knowledge or experience, or risk, or money. Enjoy life is nothing like the ability to get something equivalent expended money and realize it. And to get the full price for your money you can. Our world - a solid company. Excellent as a theory. In five years, I thought, it seems to me the same stupid, like all my other superior theory.
Good | Joy | Life | Life | Money | Order | Reward | Thought | Work | World | Worth | Learn | Thought |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
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.
Writing |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writerÂ’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a manÂ’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Change | Day | Good | Knowing | Light | Luck | Story | Luck |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Tonight, sent by the police, they come to serenade me. He laughed, then tapped his stomach.-I cannot laugh yet. As musicians they are fatal.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on the cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the coral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
The boy Paco had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended.