This book is for people dealing with conflict, which is really everybody. Because conflict is ubiquitous among humans being. From a young age, we are shaped by how conflict is expressed and resolved -- at home, at school, at work, in the wider world, within our own minds, so on and so forth. Stories too are ubiquitous. We are constantly telling stories, about ourselves and others. And conflicting stories are the stuff of disputes in all walks of life. He-said-she-said. As James Owen puts it, all stories are true, but some of them never happened.

So, the need for closure.This book -- a collection of quotations -- is appropriate for people engaged in formal as well as informal dispute resolution. It is not a highbrow treatise on dispute-resolution theory and practice, or a how-to guide for resolving disputes. It is not really "my" book. Except for these introductory words, it was written entirely by others. It consists of borrowed words, wit, and wisdom that I've inked or pasted into journals and commonplace books over the years, and later organized around various topics that I thought relevant to the dispute-resolution process.