I would always rather not know. Then, no matter what can happen,
it was not me that talked.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan, Chapter 1. |
I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad.
That's the sadness they bet before they quit or betray. That
is the sadness that comes before the sell-out.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan, Chapter 1. |
I am an old man who will live until I die.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Anselmo, Chapter 1. |
But with or without God, I think it is a sin to kill. To take
the life of another is to me very grave. I will do it whenever
necessary but I am not of the race of Pablo.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Anselmo, Chapter 3. |
You are instruments to do your duty. There are necessary orders
that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge
can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn.
As it can on everything that happens in this war. You have only
one thing to do and you must do it.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Jordan, trying to come to terms with orders
General Golz gave him, Chapter 3. |
One cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all
the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that
would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses
of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of
galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and
of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guarangy Trust Company and the
Ile de la Cité, of Foyot's old hotel, and of being able
to read and relax in the evening; of all things he had enjoyed
and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that
opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming,
idea-changing liquid alchemy.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 4. |
Where do the noses go? I always wondered where the noses would
go.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Maria when she wants to kiss Jordan, Chapter
7. |
To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need
talent and material.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Agustín, Chapter 9. |
There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished
him.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 9. |
Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that
blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind
him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he sees
you as ugly as you really are and he is not blind anymore and
then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your
man and your feeling... After a while, when you are as ugly
as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say after a while
the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful, grows
slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when
the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are
beautiful and it is all to do over.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Pilar, Chapter 10. |
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.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Pilar to Jordan and Maria. |
You only heard the statement of the loss. You did not see
the father fall as Pilar made him see the fascists die in that
story she had told by the stream. You knew the father died in
some courtyard, or against some wall, or in some field or orchard,
or at night, in the lights of a truck, beside some road. You
had seen the lights of the car from down the hills and heard
the shooting and afterwards you had come down to the road and
found the bodies. You did not see the mother shot, nor the sister,
nor the brother. You heard about it; you heard the shots; and
you saw the bodies.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan, Chapter 11. |
Then just shut up about what we are going to do afterwards,
will you, Inglés? You go back to the Republic and you
take your piece with you and leave us others alone here to decide
what part of these hills we'll die in.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Pilar, Chapter 11. |
I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I
ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual
piece in any country. 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 or thought that it could happen.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 13. |
But did thee feel the earth move?
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan to Maria, Chapter 13. |
For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun
on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the
filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all
in a blindness of that color.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 13. |
Was there ever a people whose leaders were as truly their
enemies as this one?
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan, Chapter 13. |
Maria can tell them about how some of the blue-shirted crusaders
for the true faith sat on her head while others twisted her
arms and pulled her skirts up and stuffed them in her mouth.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan, Chapter 13. |
I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy
hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full
up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have
reached a certain age.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Jordan becomes obsessed with living a
full life in his remaining time, Chapter 13. |
There is only now and if now is only two days, then two days
is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This
is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining
and asking for what you will never get, you will have a good
life.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Jordan realizes this after he and Maria
make love in the heather, Chapter 13. |
Nothing is too bloody much. You just have to take it and fight
out of it and now stop prima-donnaing and accept the fact.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 14. |
How simple it is when one knows nothing.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 14. |
It was like the excitement of the battle except it was clean...
In a snowstorm it always seemed, for a time, as though there
were no enemies. In a snowstorm the wind could blow a gale;
but it blew a white cleanness and the air was full of a driving
whiteness and all things were changed and when the wind stopped
there would be the stillness. This was a big storm and he might
as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but he might as
well enjoy it.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan, Chapter 14. |