For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway

To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult.

That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here.”

“Pablo has a sickness for her already. It is another thing which destroys him. It lies on him like a sickness when he sees her. It is best that she goes now.”

Maria filled his cup with wine. “Drink that,” she said. “It will make me seem even better. It is necessary to drink much of that for me to seem beautiful.” “Then I had better stop,” Robert Jordan said. “Already thou seemest beautiful and more.”

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope), he thought and so you had better take what time there is and be very thankful for it.

But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that nor thought that it could happen.

You were gone when you first saw her. When she first opened her mouth and spoke to you it was there already and you know it.

It hit you then and you know it and so why lie about it? You went all strange inside every time you looked at her and every time she looked at you. So why don’t you admit it? All right, I’ll admit it.

Not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom, not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up together, not to wake and know she’s there and that you’re not alone. No.

I am lonely in the day when I am not working but when the dark comes it is a time of great loneliness.

“To drink is nothing. It is to be drunk that is important.

Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead.

It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist.

Every fascist dead is a fascist less.

“I cannot. I am not accustomed to eat in the morning.”

“I suffer for others.” “As all good men should.” “But for myself very little.”

“She has made an impression on me that does not dissipate.”

Do you think you have a right to kill any one? No. But I have to. How many of those you have killed have been real fascists? Very few. But they are all the enemy to whose force we are opposing force. But you like the people of Navarra better than those of any other part of Spain. Yes. And you kill them. Yes. If you don’t believe it go down there to the camp. 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.

You’re not a real Marxist and you know it. You believe in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Don’t ever kid yourself with too much dialectics. They are for some but not for you. You have to know them in order not to be a sucker.

I’d like to be an old man and to really know.

It was a night plan and it’s morning now. Night plans aren’t any good in the morning. The way you think at night is no good in the morning.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.

Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear. It is only missing it that’s bad. Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.