A Note on Quarrelling

A quarrel – even a literary quarrel – is no more complicated a situation than two children sitting opposite each other and saying antiphonally “Yes, it is” and “No, it isn’t”.  Once started, there’s no reason why it should ever stop, except for exhaustion or death.  For quarrelling is a pathological condition; and sanity can only be restored by the accident of grace or humor.  Occasionally a quarrel will dissolve in a gale of laughter and a bottle of gin.  That this can ever happen at all lends a little variety to quarrelling.  But not much.  For the prototype of quarrelling is war; and war releases an inexorable mechanism in which the gin and laughter tend to be incidental.

–  George Whalley on Critically Speaking