Ernest Quotes

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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?

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

The first draft of anything is shit.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Maybe...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.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

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.

All thinking men are atheists.

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

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.

Never confuse movement with action.

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

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

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

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

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.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

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

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

And you'll always love me won't you? Yes And the rain won't make any difference? No

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

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

Write hard and clear about what hurts.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one 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.

we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.

I didn't want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you good night — and there's a lot of difference.

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

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

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

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

Going outside is highly overrated.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

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

Isn't it pretty to think so.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.

How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

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

You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

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

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?

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

We are all broken—that’s how the light gets in.

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.

Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.

I am always in love.

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.

I know 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.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.

Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

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.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

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. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective.

I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.