Quotes About Conflict

High-minded idiocy pitted against the power of coin.

When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

After a lull in white arrests, some towns increased the rewards for turning in collaborators. Folks informed on business rivals, ancient nemeses, and neighbors, recounting old conversations where the traitors had uttered forbidden sympathies. Children tattled on their parents, taught by schoolmistresses the hallmarks of sedition.

The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be. Cora

The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent, she told her sailor, but she took exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.

The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument and no one telling you what happened. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying KO's and low blows and devising too-late parries. You didn't know what it had been about or who'd won, just that nobody wanted to talk about it, they glance around and knead grudges in their fists.

After a few hands, I realized he was talking about me. The dismissive gesture in my direction tipped me off. I hadn't been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy.

I thought, This is where the day curdles.

You can argue for hours about the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but the dark wins every time so fuck the Beatles, just fuck 'em, perspective-wise.

Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. 

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there." We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it's crazy.

The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself.

Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp's invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat's speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

We do not talk about peace, we make peace.

The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don't go.

It's nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It's confusing to them.

How far from real the truth is. I wanted then to take every murdering bastard in Northern Ireland, and have them sleep for a night in my boy's blue rowboat, out on the lough, in the dark, among the reeds, turning in primal celtic patterns.

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.

In their familiarity, they had developed a dislike for each other.

When you come into a rich man's house, the only place to split is in his face.

Further along, one of Picasso's doves of peace with an Armalite, not an olive branch, in its mouth.