It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.

Religion is the opium of the poor.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

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.