This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings, "how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?" "For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."
Awareness | Body | Death | Dreams | Fate | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Order | Will | World | Fate | Awareness |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
But walking down the stairs feeling each stair carefully and holding to the banister he thought, I must get her away and get her away as soon as I can without hurting her. Because I am not doing too well at this. That I can promise you. But what else can you do? Nothing, he thought. There's nothing you can do. But maybe, as you go along, you will get good at it.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe, the older waiter said. With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night. I want to go home and into bed. We are of two different kinds, the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night. I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
Behavior | Day | Determination | Enough | Good | Kill | Man | Nothing | Sorrow | Understand |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids.
I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?
Competence | Good | Reputation | Science | Thought | Thought |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He thought of the Riviera, as it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely stretches of blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pine woods and the mountains of the Esterel going out into the sea. He remembered it as it was when he and Zelda had first found it before people went there for the summer.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Better | Thought | Wonder | Thought | Understand |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Discipline | Honesty | Man | Necessity | Thought | Thought |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn't there more dialogue? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn't do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Someone ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.
Kill |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.
For all organisms, then, opposing and obliterating power is evil – it threatens to stop experience. But men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it.
Body | Contradiction | Man | People | Worth |
In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not.
Ability | Character | Comfort | Consciousness | Defense | Fear | God | Ideas | Joy | Madness | Man | Meaning | Means | Men | People | Promise | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Wants | God | Thought |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
For what are we born if not to aid one another?
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I thought the pain alone would kill me.