Thomas Merton Quotes

Where words prevail not, violence prevails.

Being hated and hunted and blamed for your own suffering makes people kind of testy, nervous, and on edge, and often fundamentalist and extreme. Bombs get thrown only when people cannot honestly talk together.

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

What happened, then? You're stomping through every puddle you can find and look like you're going to punch the first person you see." "Why are you hanging around, then? Aren't you worried about getting hit?" "Aw, you'd never hurt me. My face is too pretty

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.

A fight can express things people might not be able to say with words.

War is what happens when language fails.

My own father used to boast to me of biting off a man's ear in a street fight.

Why don't you bring your face up here and let me punch it? Then you can tell me (if I'm stronger).

I dished out and suffered my fair share of bloody noses.

I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.

Blood is one of the things that made fights cool. Like, you knew it had gotten serious. I understand why we don't do it anymore.

I know if someone talked trash to me, I'd want to kick his butt.

I grew up thinking a bit of pushing and shoving was completely normal. Then I suddenly learned that if you kick another player, you get in trouble. Nobody had ever reprimanded me for that before.

At one point in my life, I felt as if fighting was everything. It was everything. I put life second.

I could legitimately put someone in a headlock, for sure.

Today, words. Tomorrow, sticks and stones. And the day after that?

Awash in a flood of hostility and despair, they battled and railed and shattered their bodies on one another, unable to find one strand, one sobering swallow of solace.

I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.

When a person begins to yell during an argument, it is a tip-off that he is unsure of himself.

Don’t interrupt,’ one of the boys said. ‘He’ll lose his life.’ Seeing it was a matter of life and death, Sophie and Michael backed toward the door. But Howl, quite unperturbed at killing his nephew, strode over to the wall and pulled the boxes up by the roots.

With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty.

Fear, she's the mother of violence.

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it.

If words suffice not, blows must follow.