The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms, ch. 34 (1929)
Source checked by an editor
When and why it was written
- When
- Published in 1929, drawing on Hemingway's service as an ambulance driver in Italy.
- Why
- Frederic Henry is reflecting in the middle of the novel's brief interval of happiness, which does not last.
What it means
The consolation is real and strictly limited, and the limit is the point. Many, not all.
The full passage continues that those the world cannot break it kills, and that it will kill you too with no particular hurry. Quoted alone the line reads as encouragement. In place it is a description of odds.
Read the source
A Farewell to Arms, 1929
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Your turn
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