I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn't think of any real good reason. There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the motives behind violence and challenges the justification for fighting.
In this quote from S.E. Hinton, the author explores the different reasons that people, particularly young men, might engage in fights. While some do so for fun, hatred, pride, or conformity, the speaker is introspective, questioning the true purpose behind their own involvement in violence and concluding that fighting may only be justifiable in self-defense, which prompts a deeper consideration of morality and personal values.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about conflict resolution in schools.
Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.
Sometimes, I feel like I spent the first part of my life wishing to be a teen-age boy, and the second part condemned to being one.
That's why people don't ever think to blame the Socs and are always ready to jump on us. We look hoody and they look decent. It could be just the other way around - half of the hoods I know are pretty decent guys underneath all that grease, and from what I've heard, a lot of Socs are just cold-blooded mean - but people usually go by looks.
Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.
Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.
...but I've never regretted it. You can't regret experience.
To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony.
On the one hand, she is cut off from the protection awarded to her sisters abroad; on the other, she has no such power to defend her interests at the polls, as is the heritage of her brothers at home.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land.
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