Ernest Hemingway Love Quotes and Sayings

Ernest Hemingway Love Quotes and Sayings

#1 Death in the Afternoon, 1932

1. 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.

#2-5 A Farewell to Arms, 1929

2. “Oh, you’re so sweet. And maybe I’d look lovely, darling, and be so thin and exciting to you and you’ll fall in love with me all over again”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said, “that’s what I want too.”

3. I don’t want you to go away. I just said that. You go if you want to. But hurry right back. Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.

4. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

5. “And you’ll always love me, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And the rain won’t make any difference?”
“No.”

#6-7 A Moveable Feast

6. Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.

7. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

#8-12 A Farewell to Arms

8. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others.

9. I’m not unfaithful, darling. I’ve plenty of faults but I’m very faithful. You’ll be sick of me I’ll be so faithful.

10. You’ve such a lovely temperature.

11. You know I don’t love any one but you. You shouldn’t mind because some one else loved me.

12. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me. I pulled her down and kissed her and felt her heart beating.

#13 Papa Hemingway (1966)

13. To be a successful father … there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

Hemingway working on his book For Whom the Bell Tolls at the Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho in December 1939, Photo credit: Wikipedia

#14 For Whom the Bell Tolls

14. I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before…

#15 The Garden of Eden

15. I’m with you. No matter what else you have in your head I’m with you and I love you.

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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.
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Sayings by Ernest Hemingway

#1-2 Papa Hemingway (1966)

1. The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.

2. Never confuse movement with action.

#3 The Sun Also Rises, 1926

3. Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?

#4 Esquire, October 1935, Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter [S]

4. Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.

#5 Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 20 April 1926, published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

5. Grace under pressure.

#6 A Moveable Feast

6. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

#7-9 A Farewell to Arms

7. I know that the night is not the same as the day : that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

8. You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.

9. It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.

#10-11 Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 28 May 1934

10. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

11. Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it.

#12 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940

12. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

#13-14 The Good Life According to Hemingway

13. My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

14. There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

#15 Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway

15. You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.

#16 The Sun Also Rises (1926)

16. You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.

#17 Letter to Maxwell Perkins, 4 April 1932, The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor

17. The first and final thing you have to do in this world is last in it and not be smashed by it and your work the same way.

#18 Death in the Afternoon, 1932

18. 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 man’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.

#19 Green Hills of Africa, 1935

19. I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.

#20-21 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940

20. Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.

21. How do you know they are impossible until you have tried them? If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, “Impossible,” when orders came?

#22-24 A Farewell to Arms, 1929

22. But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.

23. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

24. No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

#25-27 The Old Man and the Sea, 1952

25. Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is. [S]

26. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready. [S]

27. “But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” [S]

#28 The Good Life According to Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner

28. In order to write about life, first you must live it.

#29 For Whom the Bell Tolls

29. This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.

#30-31 The Garden of Eden

30. Everybody has strange things that mean things to them. You couldn’t help it.

31. I’m tired of everybody…Please forgive me.

#32 Cat in the Rain

32. I wanted it so much, I don’t know why I wanted it so much.
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Unsourced Ernest Hemingway Quotes

1. A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

2. Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.