Ernest Hemingway Quotes

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.

No need to be sentimental to mourn the loss of Paradise.

When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.

Is to have had and lost/Better than not having at all?

From the tower battlements, Dustfinger looked down on a lake as black as night, where the reflection of the castle swam in a sea of stars. The wind passing over his unscarred face was cold from the snow of the surrounding mountains, and Dustfinger relished life as if he were tasting it for the first time. The longing it brought, and the desire. All the bitterness, all the sweetness, even if it was only for a while, never for more than a while, everything gained and lost, lost and found again.

Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which bear out the past.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing.

My favorite songs to sing have always been songs about regret. I don't know why that is, but to me, that's country music.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

I envy the dead.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.