Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the permanence of actions and decisions, particularly regarding violence.
Martin Amis's quote highlights the irrevocable nature of certain actions, especially those involving harm. Once a bullet is fired, it cannot be unmade or taken back, symbolizing the consequences of our choices and the importance of exercising caution and responsibility in moments of aggression.
In practice
During a discussion on the impact of gun violence in a community meeting.
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.
It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
Fanaticism is at its very strongest when it has political or, better still, religious motivation.
And so it is, that both the Devil and the angelic Spirit present us with objects of desire to awaken our power of choice.
Babylon, Learned and wise, hath perished utterly, Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh That would lament her.
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