Quotes About Complexity

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

I am large! I contain multitudes!

There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.

As his sixth wife, Debbie became a stepmother to Blackmore's thirty-one kids, most of whom were older than she was. And because he happened to be the father of Debbie's own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.

Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.

Americans tend to prefer their presidents on horseback: heroes who dream big and sound trumpets. There is, however, another kind of leader – quieter and less glamorous but no less significant – whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to management of complexity than to the making of mass movements.

Where Goldwaterites saw the world in black and white, Rockefeller noted shades of gray.

It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power. The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.

I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label.

complicated human behavior was increasingly getting labeled a mental disorder.

I hadn't realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been

he's a grey area, in a world that doesn't like grey areas, but the grey areas are where you find the complexity, it's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth.

She was 3/4 perfection and 1/4 broken glass.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.

Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.

It was this other side of Avery - the fact that he so visibly had an other side - that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

He blamed her both for liking his mother and for

She could clearly perceive the contours of her obsession with him. It would have been sensible to tear it from her skull, but the object had grown too large to be removed without splitting her head open. Despite its sick enormity, it was also too beautiful to her.

Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'The Sun Also Rises.' But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

The infinite variety of human badness.