Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

22 Sourced Quotes

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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.

Ernest Hemingway
He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run... but thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

Ernest Hemingway
The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. 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
Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
I don't know, the boy said. All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.

Ernest Hemingway
He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Ernest Hemingway
'Ay,' he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

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

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

Ernest Hemingway
"Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish."

Ernest Hemingway
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in.... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

Ernest Hemingway
The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.

Ernest Hemingway
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Ernest Hemingway
You did not do so badly for something that is worthless. But there was a time when I could not find you.

Ernest Hemingway
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.

Ernest Hemingway
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

Ernest Hemingway
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

Ernest Hemingway
There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only one you.

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

Ernest Hemingway
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 fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had 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, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

Ernest Hemingway
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
"Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?"

Ernest Hemingway
Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

Ernest Hemingway