If one must die, he thought, and clearly one must, I can die. But I hate it.
When it comes to death, who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight?
Dante only made crazy people feel they could write great poetry. That was not true of course but then almost nothing was true and especially not in Africa. In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.
Wilson looked at them both. If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?
How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes.
As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.
A coward dies a thousand times, but a brave man only once.
Que cosa mas mala es la guerra – What a horrible thing war is.
It is not basically a question of the size in repose,” I said. “It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.
The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.
Don’t you know it is wrong to kill? Yes. But you do it? Yes. And you still believe absolutely that your cause is right? Yes.
Whether one has fear of it or not, one’s death is difficult to accept.
To kill them teaches nothing,” Anselmo said. “You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred.
Let them all go to hell, except the people, and then, when they come to power, we must be dam cautious to see what they will become.
Maybe I have had all my life in three days, he thought. If that’s true I wish we would have spent the last night differently. But last nights are never any good. Last nothings are any good.
Mary’s extremely nice cousin had given us two small square sacking-covered pillows filled with balsam needles. I always slept with mine under my neck or, if I slept on my side, with my ear on it. It was the smell of Michigan when I was a boy and I wished I could have had a sweet-grass basket to keep it in when we traveled and to have under the mosquito net in the bed at night.
But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts.” I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of them I could not like and some I still hated.
YOU DO NOT know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly.
Tengo miedo de morir.
A Farewell to Arms To.