War & Peace Quote by Katherine Dunn

Dunn’s line catches America in the act of self-seduction: we flirt with violence as spectacle, then recoil when the bill comes due. “Long romance” is the sting. Romance implies choice, repetition, even nostalgia; it frames brutality not as an alien intrusion but as a relationship we keep renewing. The phrasing also smuggles in complicity: you don’t romance something by accident. You pursue it, dress it up, build rituals around it.

The counterweight, “our terror,” isn’t moral clarity so much as panic at consequences we can’t edit out. Dunn stacks the harms with a journalist’s cadence - “war and crime and environmental havoc” - widening the indictment beyond battlefields and back alleys. Environmental devastation sits beside war and crime like an accusatory flourish: violence isn’t only what we do to bodies, but what we do to systems that keep bodies alive. That move punctures the neat cultural fiction that violence is exceptional, episodic, the domain of “bad actors.” It’s structural, ambient, profitable.

As a novelist, Dunn is attuned to the stories a nation tells itself to manage guilt. American culture sells violence as redemption (the righteous gun, the clean ending) while privately dreading the messy afterlife: trauma, contagion, ruin. The subtext is less “Americans are violent” than “America is addicted to the aesthetics of violence while refusing intimacy with its outcomes.” The sentence works because it doesn’t offer a cure; it names the double-bind that keeps the cycle marketable, deniable, and therefore enduring.