Daily Inspiration Quote by Aaron Allston

Allston’s line flips a familiar moral cliche into a character diagnosis. “Refuge” is the key word: violence isn’t framed as raw aggression so much as a hiding place, a default shelter the violent retreat to when anything else would require imagination, patience, or vulnerability. By making violence a “first” refuge, he suggests a warped hierarchy of problem-solving: before talk, before strategy, before empathy, the violent reach for force the way an anxious person reaches for a cigarette. It’s not just chosen; it’s clung to.

The subtext is quietly contemptuous. We tend to grant violence the aura of decisiveness, even competence. Allston punctures that mythology. If violence is a refuge, it’s also a confession of limited tools and a fear of losing control in any arena where fists and weapons don’t translate. The phrase “of the violent” matters too: he’s not talking about a single bad act, but a type of person (or a system) whose identity is invested in coercion. The target isn’t righteous self-defense; it’s the habitual resort to domination.

As a novelist, Allston is writing for scenes, not sermons. The sentence reads like a rule-of-thumb for reading conflict on the page and off it: when someone escalates instantly, pay attention to what they’re trying to avoid - accountability, negotiation, being seen as weak, the possibility that they’re wrong. It’s a compact way to make violence look less like power and more like panic dressed up as certainty.