Quotes About Structure

GREAT ADVANCES DO NOT COME OUT OF SYSTEMS DESIGNED TO PRODUCE GREAT ADVANCES.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system

AS SYSTEMS GROW IN SIZE AND COMPLEXITY, THEY TEND TO LOSE BASIC FUNCTIONS

Prior to taking up philosophy I had spent half a decade as an art student and I am quite sure that what persuaded me of the importance and veracity of these ancient ideas was my art school education. For art making is all about discerning and creating structures. When later, as a philosophy student, I read Wittgenstein's instruction to attend to the differences, I heard an echo of the art teacher's command to look at the gaps between objects and draw them also.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.

Geometry is 'number in space', music is 'number in time'.

A life's journey is like a musical composition, born into the world from nothing, living for a time in form and structure, dancing spontaneously on the edge of chaos and order, and then finally returning. In this respect Western music tends to be more linear, Eastern music more cyclical.

The dodecagon is also made from six squares and six equilateral triangles fitted around a hexagon

Ten is formed from two pentagons and ten life-invoking pentagons sit perfectly arpund a decagon, and DNA, appropriately as the key to the reproduction of life, has ten steps for each turn of its double helix, so appears in cross-section as a tenfold rosette.

Organizing is a process; an organization is the result of that process.

All buildings have a psychological as well as a purely visual effect on the landscape.

But as you said, the complexity of our organizations almost guarantees that there are not many of them.

But inheritance doesn't come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.

From here, she could observe the structure of the Jacob's Ladder. She had a confused idea of lattices and bulbous habitats, of corridors, threading asymmetrically over the surfaces of anchores and domaines. Of gray metal and patchy paint. Now she saw the world in all its incomprehensible vastness, like a grandly rotating three-dimensional spiderweb, and the complexity bewildered her.

They met where their edges brushed in one of the voids in the world's great Tinkertoy structure.

They were deep within the world, and its hungry latticework structure had consumed the available light.

The structure of the world loomed in the partial visibility overhead, a lattice skeleton swathed erratically with light and darkness, further structures gleaming dully through translucent gas until depth of field rendered it opaque.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

Today, without its exotic carapace, the exterior is a reddish brick within which the arches and buttresses that made such a feat of engineering possible are clearly visible. They have their own beauty; through such structural expertise the Pantheon has been in constant use for 1,875 years.

I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us--off-kilter as we had been--was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended...I saw how our roots were so tenaciously around one another's hearts. My husband said, "But you didn't even like them." And I felt especially frightened after that.

Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.