Ernest Hemingway: I believe that love that is true and real, creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And then the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face, like some rhino-hunters I know or Belmonte, who is truly brave... It is because they make love with sufficient passion, to push death out of their minds... until it returns, as it does, to all men... and then you must make really good love again.

Ernest Hemingway: No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast —

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

Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast —

Gil: I would like you to read my novel and get your opinion.
Ernest Hemingway: I hate it.
Gil: You haven't even read it yet.
Ernest Hemingway: If it's bad, I'll hate it. If it's good, then I'll be envious and hate it even more. You don't want the opinion of another writer.

Gil: Gil Pender.
Ernest Hemingway: Hemingway.
Gil: Hemingway?
Ernest Hemingway: You liked my book?
Gil: Liked? I loved all of your work.
Ernest Hemingway: Yes. It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it's not only noble but brave.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast —

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.

-Ernest Hemingway, “Scott Fitzgerald,” A Moveable Feast —

It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it.

Ernest Hemingway, “Hunger is Good Discipline,” A Moveable Feast —

I’m not brave any more, darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (via akuumi)

(Source: decembrist)

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