In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")
Interpretation
The quote reflects the idea that violence stems from a deep desire for wholeness and resolution.
Peter Straub's quote suggests that violence can be driven by an inherent longing for what is missing in life, indicating that people often resort to destructive means in the hope of achieving a sense of completeness or closure. The metaphor of the body and the wing emphasizes that without essential components, pursuits or lives can feel unfulfilled, much like an ornament lacking significance without its context.
In practice
During a lecture on human emotions, you might use this quote to illustrate the complexities of violent behavior.
Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.
We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
Equality, absolutely, that's what defines us. It's what makes us great. If it doesn't sit well with your religion, let your God sort it out in the end, but that's us. We're equal
A lot of leftists think it is soccer's fault that people don't think, while most rightists are convinced that soccer is a proof that people think with their feet.
A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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