Great Throughts Treasury

"I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"I wondered... if there should be anything wrong with Sen. Joe McCarthy (Republican) of Wisconsin which a .577 solid would not cure." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in this own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"Robert Jordan saw them there on the slope, close to him now, and below he saw the road and the bridge and the long lines of vehicles below it. He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind... He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"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, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"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." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"It is Mystery -- the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event -- or accident -- in any life on earth ... [that] I want to realize in the theatre. The solution, if there ever be any, will probably have to be produced in a test tube and turn out to be discouragingly undramatic." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"At about this point the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know what part of it they live in." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound