Self-Consciousness: Memoirs

pp. 169 - 170

Hemingway, 1947, wrote of recovering from World War I wounds: “I was very ignorant at nineteen and had read little and I remember the sudden happiness and the feeling of having a permanent protecting talisman when a young British officer I met in the hospital first wrote out for me, so that I could remember these lines: ‘By my troth, I care not: a man can die but once; we owe God a death . . . and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’”