Ernest Hemingway Quotes

War? War is an organized bore.

Some of the shells brought my heart into my mouth; lying there waiting for them was intolerable. I was sure I was going to be blown to pieces.

War makes early risers of us all.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.

I think war is a dangerous place.

Sure Vietnam is a dirty war. I've never heard of a clean one.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

No study is possible on the battlefield.

At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

I know of nothing more exciting than war.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.

One of the parodoxes of war is that those in the rear want to get up into the fight, while those in the lines want to get out.

War is death's feast.

The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.

You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.