Literature - Ernest Hemingway

He was without a doubt a flawed human being. But the stories he wrote are a guide to being a man in this world.

Some reasons to love Papa.

To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?... The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.


Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don't cheat with it.

You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice. Speaking to his son Gregory, as quoted in Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."

Literature - The Iliad

Sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles the son of Peleus,

the destructive rage that sent countless pains on the Achaeans...

This is the great-grandfather of all things that are manly. Take a moment to reflect upon the long passages dedicated to the blow-by-blow descriptions of hand-to-hand combat. Spinning the tale like a ring announcer, Homer gives the names of the fighters, tells how they taunt each other, lets them exclaim their battle-cries, and, then, goes on to gruesomely detail the ways in which they kill, maim and vanquish each other.

Was Homer "tapping into" that which is manly when he wrote his tale or has this story so affected that which is manly that his idiom has set our manly blueprint in stone? We will never know. For this reason, this work of fiction, The Iliad, belongs in the Manliness Hall of Fame.