For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner Classics)

by Ernest Hemingway

As they spoke, the owl flew between the trees with the softness of all silence, dropping past them, then rising, the wings beating quickly, but with no noise of feathers moving as the bird hunted. “Look at him,” the gypsy said in the dark. “Thus should men move.” “And in the day, blind in a tree with crows around him,” Robert Jordan said.

Agustín stood there looking down at him and cursed him, speaking slowly, clearly, bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field, lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.

If our father had not been a Republican both Eladio and I would be soldiers now with the fascists and if one were a soldier with them then there would be no problem. One would obey orders and one would live or die and in the end it would be however it would be. It was easier to live under a regime than to fight it.

I think that killing a man with an automatic weapon makes it easier. I mean on the one doing it. It is different.

Once you saw it again as it was to others, once you got rid of your own self, the always ridding of self that you had to do in war. Where there could be no self. Where yourself is only to be lost.