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.
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But... this is what God wants of you.
Strange and marvelous things will happen with constant regularity as you alter your life and begin living in harmony with the laws of the universe.
For the bourgeoisie, the main danger against which it had to be protected, that which had to be avoided at all costs, was armed uprising, was the armed people, was the workers taking to the streets in an assault against the government.
You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.
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