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.
That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.
Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.
Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
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