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Reading
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The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.
-Ernest Hemingway
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and the afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and places and how the weather was.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Retirement
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Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Simplicity
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My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Sports
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Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Storytelling
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Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Style
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I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Success & Failure
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But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Survival
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Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Symbols
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There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Travel
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Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Truth
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I know now that there is no one thing that is true -- it is all true.
-Ernest Hemingway
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There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Twentieth Century
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Vacations
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I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
-Ernest Hemingway
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War
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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
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They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
-Ernest Hemingway, Notes on the Next War, "published in Esquire Magazine (1935)"
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Wealth
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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
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Widow, Widowhood
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There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Wine
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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.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Words
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All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway
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All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
-Ernest Hemingway
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World
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The world is a fine place worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Books by and about Ernest Hemingway