Quotes About Conflict

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

They were wearing camouflage gear direct from central casting, and if it hadn't been for the guns I might have laughed, not yet realizing that female laughter would soon be in short supply.

We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness

The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church.

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don't suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.

He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled.

The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.

First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone.

Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don't want to kill the bodies of other women.

At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against his parents. His right hand was Evil Dad, and his left was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit. Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom's cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemmoroids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered.

Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe. Nothing safer than dead, said Rita, angrily.

Immortality and mortality didn't mix well: it was fire and mud, only the fire always won. The gods were never averse to making a mess. In fact they enjoyed it.

house divided against itself could not stand.

Most hearts say, I want, I want, I want, I want. My heart is more duplicitous, though to twin as I once thought. It says, I want, I don't want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen

You don't take a hammer – not to mention an electric screwdriver and a pipe wrench – to a guy's computer without being quite angry.

She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

His generation believed that if there was trouble all you'd have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.

Every war is the war for whoever's lived through it.

Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war!