Quotes About Conflict

What's going on in the Senate is kind of a politics of escalation. We're getting sort of like the Mideast: pay back everybody when you're in charge.

The Customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an a**hole. That's the first rule of retail.

Angels invite themselves, but you invite your own demons.

But I know just what it feels like to have a voice in the back of my head, like a face that I hold inside, face that awakes when I close my eyes, face that watches everytime I lie, face that laughs everytime I fall. (It watches EVERYTHING) ... But the face inside is hearing me, right beneath my skin.

The very worst part of you is me.

This isn't what I wanted to be, I never thought that what I said would have you running from me

God doesn't do anything to us. He doesn't have to. We're too busy doing it to each other.

That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.

I believe a good writer can write a good book with any sort of character, in any sort of setting, but I prefer to write about the outsider. It might just be because I've been one (or perceived myself to be one) for so much of my life. But the simple fact of being marginalized immediately brings conflict to a story before the narrative even begins, and that's gold for a writer because it means that your character already has depth before events begin to unfold.

However small we made ourselves, we took space and air from our neighbours. We were a torment to one another.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon—the smallest of compromises, the little roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering.

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me.

Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. "I knew exactly what I was doing." He leaned onto his elbows. "And I'd do it again." "I

With relish, Kevin explained the boy's claim to fame: An elderly couple in an adjacent apartment had complained about how loudly he played his CDs of the Monkees at three in the morning. The next weekend, the couple's daughter discovered her parents in their bed, slit from crotch to throat. "That's appalling," I said. "I can't believe anyone still listens to the Monkees.

Our house had not been spurted with the Day-Glo spray of spontaneous outrage but slathered with a hatred that had reduced until it was thick and savorous, like a fine French sauce.

For westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is biologically perverse.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.

Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.

I do not understand it, this fighting and killing/ and urge to conquer." His gaze turned downward then. I touched his arm, and he glanced at me, all the sorrow on this earth filling his eyes then. "I will never understand it.

Until that night Lucille had believed that people say things in anger that they do not really mean. By the time the fracas in her dining room had ended, however, she had come to believe that what people say in anger is what they really do mean, but usually have the self-control to keep to themselves.

We are meek in the way we follow and fierce in the way we fight. In this manner, gentle and fierce meet and are comfortable.

Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—