The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the complex relationship between humans and the things they rely on for survival, often intertwined with humor and irony.
In this quote, Hemingway uses the metaphor of bulls as 'best friends' to explore the idea of companionship in survival. The subsequent ironic twist, where the speaker admits to killing them for his own safety, underscores the conflicting nature of relationships where love and betrayal can coexist. It evokes the theme of human dependence on others, even when such relationships can lead to sacrifice or hardship.
In practice
During a philosophy discussion about the nature of relationships and sacrifice.
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs
The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by.
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.
Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.
Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.
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