For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway

if I live later, I will try to live in such a way, doing no harm to any one, that it will be forgiven.”

If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.”

How often have I heard Finito say that it is all knowledge and that the bull never gored the man; rather the man gored himself on the horn of the bull.

“If you have not seen the day of revolution in a small town where all know all in the town and always have known all, you have seen nothing.

drunkenness is the same in my country. It is ugly and brutal.”

“Then I went back inside the room and I sat there and I did not wish to think for that was the worst day of my life until one other day.” “What was the other?” Maria asked. “Three days later when the fascists took the town.”

Look at the Pilar woman, he thought. No matter what comes, if there is time, I must make her tell me the rest of that story. Look at her walking along with those two kids. You could not get three better-looking products of Spain than those. She is like a mountain and the boy and the girl are like young trees. The old trees are all cut down and the young trees are growing clean like that. In spite of what has happened to the two of them they look as fresh and clean and new and untouched as though they had never heard of misfortune.

He looked at her striding happily in the sun; her khaki shirt open at the neck. She walks like a colt moves, he thought. You do not run onto something like that.

From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting.

How simple it is when one knows nothing.

The coming of the dark always made him feel lonely and tonight he felt so lonely that there was a hollowness in him as of hunger. In the old days he could help this loneliness by the saying of prayers and often coming home from hunting he would repeat a great number of the same prayer and it made him feel better. But he had not prayed once since the movement. He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men were receiving.

I am lonely. But so are all the soldiers and the wives of all the soldiers and all those who have lost families or parents.

“Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practise in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.”

you did the thing there was to do and knew that you were right.

“There are those who suffer and those who do not. I suffer very little.”

proudly. I believe in the people and their right to govern themselves as they wish. But you mustn’t believe in killing, he told himself. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. If you believe in it the whole thing is wrong.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion.

thinking of his father had thrown him off. He understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him.

To understand is to forgive.

What an animal a man is in a rage.”

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life

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.

As long as there is one of us there is both of us. Do you understand?”

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies.

you learn, watching them live and fight and die, that there are worse things than war. Cowardice is worse, treachery is worse, and simple selfishness is worse.

The totalitarian fascist states believe in the totalitarian war. That, put simply, means that whenever they are beaten by armed forces they take their revenge on unarmed civilians.

There is only one way to quell a bully, and that is to thrash him; and the bully of fascism is being beaten now in Spain as Napoleon was beaten in that same peninsula a hundred and thirty years ago.

You may frighten a man by threatening to kill his brother or his wife and children. But if you kill his brother or his wife and children you only make of him an implacable enemy. This is the lesson the fascists have not yet learned.