“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway wrote this in A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. The full passage continues: But those that will not break it kills. It draws directly from his experience being wounded in World War I at age 18 and reflects his lifelong belief that suffering either strengthens or destroys a person.
I was eighteen when a shell tore through my legs on the Italian front. Over two hundred pieces of metal buried in my body. The man next to me died. I did not. In the hospital I fell in love with a nurse who later told me she didn't want me. That broke something different. I spent the rest of my life writing about people who get broken by the world and find out what they are made of afterward. Some get stronger where they cracked. Others never heal. What matters is not whether the world breaks you, because it will. What matters is what grows in the place where you broke.