Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

Women who pay their own rent don't have to be nice.

Defining men as the perpetrators of all violence is a viciously immoral judgment of an entire gender. And defining women as inherently nonviolent condemns us to the equally restrictive role of sweet, meek, and weak.

Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.