Ernest Hemingway on Death

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

"Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth: Hemingstein's Law on the Dynamics of Dying."

"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it."

"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."

"Hemingway's Gravesite"

"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave."

"The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever...Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality."

"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 by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés."

"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"

"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."