A Farewell to Arms quotes

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.

That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.

I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace.

No I’m not. But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.

No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.

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.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

Poor, poor dear Cat. And this was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.

You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.

But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

“Let’s drop the war.” “It’s very hard. There’s no place to drop it.”

What is defeat? You go home.

War is not won by victory. What if we take San Gabriele? What if we take the Carso and Monfalcone and Trieste? Where are we then?

God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one.

It’s all right. Keep right on lying to me. That’s what I want you to do.

There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.

Only being sent away from you. You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.

He was a legitimate hero who bored every one he met.

We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.

“He was probably a coward,” she said. “He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”

I don’t know. Everybody ought to have some place to go.

We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others.

The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else’s college.