Ernest Hemingway quotes about mortality

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.

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

Poor, poor dear Cat. And this was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.

But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

“He was probably a coward,” she said. “He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”

All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.

We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together.

I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.

Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me.

I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.

The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it.

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

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as any one I ever knew.

“They may crack,” she said. “Anybody may crack.”

You always feel trapped biologically.

Doctors did things to you and then it was not your body any more.

“If you are going to shoot me,” the lieutenant-colonel said, “please shoot me at once without further questioning. The questioning is stupid.”

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

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.

I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.