"They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations."

"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee."

"He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride."

"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."

"He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought."

"Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation."

"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

"I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. . . . Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. . . . There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers."

"The first draft of anything is shit."

"The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean."

"His (the writer's) standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention out of his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be."

"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love."

"You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

"I obscenity in the milk of my shame."

"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."

"Religion is the opium of the poor."

"He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think about and he must think it out clearly and take everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was a bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult."

"It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."

"Never fall in love?""Always," said the count. "I am always in love."

"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."

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

"Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond."

"For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there."

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

"I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend."

"If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed."

"It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone."

"That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

"How little we know of what there is to know."

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

"You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself."

"A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

"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."

"Are you a communist?""No I am an anti-fascist""For a long time?""Since I have understood fascism."

"No. Have it here where it is quiet." "You and your quiet", said Brett. "What is it men feel about quiet?" "We like it," said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear."

"I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it, as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know."

"The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water."

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."

"I still need some more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently."

"I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it."

"Never mistake motion for action."

"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."

"I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

"Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?"

"That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way."

"Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary."

"To understand is to forgive."