Brin-Jonathan Butler Quotes

Bullfights have so much color. Not just the matador but also the bull, the arena, and the public. It's all very festive.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.

Courage and grace are a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.

I rendezvous with the long wire and perform the 'torero walk', gliding my feet, holding the pole away from my body, head high.

A picador is the guy in a bullfight who helps make sure the matador doesn't get killed by distracting the bull. That's what TV writing is. You're just distracting the bull long enough to stick around for the next set of commercials.

I had an uncle who took me to the ring in Medellin when I was 15 years old. In school, we had someone who taught us how to bullfight.

You can't have a good bullfight without a good bull.

Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport -- two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.

After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to the spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, to the gladiators.

["The Sun Also Rises" is about] bullfighting, bullslinging and bullsh[*]t.

I think bullfights are for men who aren't very brave and wish they were.

The bullfighter who torments a bull to death and then castrates it of an ear has neither proved nor increased his own virility; he has merely demonstrated that he is a butcher with balletic tendencies.

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.

The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Life, a beauty chased by tragic laughter.

I think life is perverse. It can be beautiful, but it won't.

I'd love to see that rat nose smashed!

The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

The depressing thing about an Englishman's traditional love of animals is the dishonesty thereof ... Get a barbed hook into the upper lip of a salmon, drag him endlessly around the water until he loses his strength, pull him to the bank, hit him on the head with a stone, and you may well become fisherman of the year. Shoot.the salmon and you'll never be asked again.

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.

In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence.

Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies.