Farewell to Arms- “If people bring courage” Ernest Hemingway

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”~Ernest Hemingway

My favorite book of his is “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. The title was taken from a poem by John Donne written about the Bubonic Plague.

Donne’s “Meditation 17” is one of a series of essays he wrote when he was seriously ill in the winter of 1623, some say it was 1624, and has since been popularly remembered for one excerpt:

No man is an island,
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were.
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.