Talk:Ernest Hemingway
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A great Hemingway quote is "You lose it if you talk about it," but I'm not sure exactly where this is from.. does anyone know for sure?
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[edit] Islands In The Stream Quotes
I'm currently reading Islands In The Stream and found what I thought were several quotable [or at least, more quotable than the rest which I am enjoying immensely] lines:
"Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting." - page 40 & 41 of Section I [Bimini]
"Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable." - page 84, ibid.
"He had not slept with the Princess on the ship although by the time they had reached Haifa they had done so many other things that they had both reached a sort of ecstasy of desperation that was so intense that they should have been required by law to sleep with each other until they could not stand it another time simply for the relief of their nerves, if for no other reason." - page 84 of section II [Cuba].
I'm very inexperienced with Wiki's so I thought it'd be best if I just added them here for someone more experienced to decide whether they should go on the article page or not. -- ZDavies 21:47, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Some quotes I can't find
They may be misattributed. Perhaps someone knows them.
In Jarhead one of the characters says "We burn the fat off our souls. Hemingway said that." Is this a real quote?
The other one, I forget where I read it and I can't find it again: "I can't trust a man who doesn't drink, because a man who doesn't drink doesn't trust himself." 169.132.38.100 18:50, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
As regards the Hemingway quote, I think it's from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" but the quote is actually to do with a character wanting to work the fat off his soul the way a fighter worked and trained the fat off his body. I could be wrong though. Solomon
Yes, from The Snows of Kilimanjaro: "There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body." Strohs
Someone asked where "You lose it if you talk about it," came from. It is a recurring theme in his work. The not-uncommon idea of a central character in a Hemingway story being tremendously defined by a terrible pain, injury, or experience which they carried silently. Like in The Sun Also Rises where the man has lost his arm and so little is said of it. Or the knife-fight on the boat-docks. Another example is a series of small disconnected paragraphs about the war used in front the of title pages (including the below which was in front of CH VII Soldiers Home) in his book of complete short stories.
"While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anyone."
[edit] "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
This is from The Garden of Eden, just after the couple have met her, talking about her friend and why she went away (I only have the MS Reader version in fromt of me so I can't make a meaningful page reference). I'm new here so I haven't removed it from the unsourced quotes but someone else might if they read this and agree.
[edit] Unsourced
- 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.
- Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
- Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
- I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
- Even when I was in a crowd, I was always alone.
- Modern life is too often a mechanical oppression and liquor provides the only mechanical relief.
- The first draft of anything is shit.
- There are only three sports; car racing, bull fighting and mountain climbing. The rest are mere games.
- Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano.
- Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of pick-nose love. ( To Have and Have Not)
- There is no hunting like the hunting of man. And those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
- (On seeing a Spanish Government aeroplane bomb a bridge teeming with fleeing civilians from a hillside above the city) "Never put all your Basques in one exit."
- Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
- It is not difficult to write a novel, all you have to do is to sit down at a typewriter and cut open a vein.
