from A Farewell to Arms
...There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. 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....
American journalist and novelist. Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway began his professional writing career immediately after graduation from high school, reporting for newspapers in Kansas City and Toronto. He was wounded while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. In the 1920s he lived in Paris as part of the expatriate Lost Generation; it was there that he developed the terse, understated literary style for which he is renowned. Hemingway's reputation rests on such short story collections as In Our Time (1925) and Men without Women (1927), and on his classic novels, including The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The Old Man and the Sea (1952) was the last work published during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. See also hemingwaysociety.org. 