Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

Mahy’s line does the sly thing her best books often do: it lowers the stakes with self-deprecation, then quietly widens the frame until you’re staring at human behavior in miniature. “I’ve never actually been a fighter myself” reads like a confession, but it’s also a positioning tactic. She’s declining the romantic myth of conflict as vigor or virtue. Fighting “tires me out” isn’t just personal preference; it’s a refusal of the cultural script that treats confrontation as proof of seriousness. The kicker, “I’m not an efficient fighter anyway,” makes combat sound like a workplace competency. That deadpan managerial language punctures the macho fantasy: if arguing is an industry, she’s opting out of the productivity metrics.

Then she pivots: “but I have certainly seen other people…” This isn’t the moral high ground of a pacifist; it’s the observational stance of a storyteller. Mahy suggests that even if she won’t enter the ring, she’s been close enough to watch the choreography. “Great complicated goes at one another” is wonderfully specific. “Great” grants intensity, even grandeur; “complicated” insists that conflict is rarely clean or purely righteous. “Goes” keeps it colloquial, almost playground-like, hinting at how adult battles often recycle childhood dynamics with better vocabularies.

Context matters: Mahy wrote for young people without condescending to them, and she understood that kids live inside other people’s arguments. The quote carries that sensibility. It’s not a manifesto against fighting; it’s a portrait of conflict as exhausting theater, and of the writer as someone who turns that theater into narrative instead of bruises.