Quotes About Conflict

There are no new plots, but there are plenty of fresh new characters with whom you can grab the reader. Characterization is the key to successful commercial fiction. Characterization starts with goal, motivation, and conflict. Character

Cowards and courage make for great conflict. Embodied within the statement above is the idea that imperfect heroes are the most satisfying because true courage is facing what you fear, trying even though the odds of failure are great. Internal

Just as the word "because" triggers a clause of motivation, the word "but" triggers a clause of conflict.

if the thought of conflict and trouble makes you chortle gleefully and race to your computer, you are definitely in the right place. If you love conflict, chances are your characters will be flawed and in trouble. That's a good thing. Here's why: People with perfect lives are boring, and . . . well . . . frankly, they're irritating. How

The strength of your book is your conflict. For many writers that sentence should read, "The strength of your book is your villain." How

The absence of love isn't necessarily hate. But I do hate what you did.

Wasn't that the way of things now? Everybody thought they were better at policing than cops. Cops were suddenly the enemy.

Only the New Englanders, who had destroyed or driven out all their Indians, spoke against Manifest Destiny.

A subordinate chief, Black Hawk, refused to retreat. He created an alliance with the Winnebagos, Pottawotamies, and Kickapoos, and declared war against the new settlements.

The whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told. —YELLOW WOLF OF THE NEZ PERCÉ

This war did not spring up here in our land; this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land from us without price, and who, in our land, do a great many evil things. The Great Father and his children are to blame for this trouble.

The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890—the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude

During the time of the white man's Civil War, troubles arose between the Modocs and the settlers. If a Modoc could not find a deer to kill for his family, he would sometimes kill a rancher's cow; or if he needed a horse he would borrow one out of a settler's pasture.

Why do you not want schools?" the commissioner asked. "They will teach us to have churches," Joseph answered. "Do you not want churches?" "No, we do not want churches." "Why do you not want churches?" "They will teach us to quarrel about God," Joseph said. "We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.

The Navahos could forgive the Rope Thrower for fighting them as a soldier, for making prisoners of them, even for destroying their food supplies, but the one act they never forgave him for was cutting down their beloved peach trees.

it is better for both parties to come together without arms and talk it over and find some peaceful way to settle it. —SINTE-GALESHKA (SPOTTED TAIL) OF THE BRULÉ SIOUX

I now think a little powder and lead is the best food for them," he concluded. 7

The fight is always the same within the Democratic Party, isn't it? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You can't leave out half the world's experience and expect to address all the problems. Women communicate differently and process information differently, which leads them to resolve conflicts differently.

You could wear the horns off a billy goat, you know that? Are you purposely trying to make me mad?

Quit bullying Mr. Carlisle," Billy said. "He's simply trying to help." Hunter made a slicing action with his hand. "Not another word, Billy." Narrowing her eyes, she leaned right up to him. "I'll talk if I want to, when I want to, and how I want to. Lalalalalalalalalala." Sweet mother of all that is good and holy, but he wanted to wring her neck.

You know, religion itself, Eastern and Western, is divisive and quarrelsome anyway.

When you struggle with your partner, you are struggling with yourself. Every fault you see in them touches a denied weakness in yourself.

Once war becomes a clash of absolutes, there is no breathing room for mercy. Absolute truth is blind truth.