50 Book Challenge - Book 7
Book : A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Here’s a quote:
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 afterward 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.
Yeah, it’s that kind of book. It’s a war book. Not really pro-war–it does strip away all the accompanying romantic notions of loyalty, honor, patriotism, and sacrifice–but it’s not really anti-war, either. It’s more anti-world. It’s a love book too, but still anti-world.
And yeah, that’s all you’re getting out of me. If anyone else out there hasn’t read Hemingway by now, I’d definitely recommend it. Good stuff.
March 24th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
that is a great book — and a great quote.
my favorite from it though remains this one:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slipped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear….Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
also, if you haven’t already read it, check out The Sun Also Rises. that is probably my favorite Hemingway
March 24th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
Yeah, that’s another good one. This was the first of Hemingway’s novels I’ve read, and I was amazed at the number of nice quotes in it. Great stuff.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m sure the local library will have that one. (I stopped in today to check out your earlier recommendations and they didn’t have any of them… guess I’ve gotta make a trip up to Borders one of these days)
It’s really a shame that I’m only now getting around to reading all these great books. My education feels more and more inadequate with each one I read.