Quotes About Complexity

But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.

It's a Thing thing. You wouldn't understand.

Don't mind Mallory. She's a sweetheart, once you get past the fact that she's a horrible person.

An only child herself, she was frequently disturbed by the complexity of sibling relationships among her own children.

Each reported on a myriad others, filaments in an evangelistic web of treachery that stretched across the country.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was.

As we say in this part of the world," he said to the Discovery, "there's nowt so queer as folk.

If you were to ask me what the book is about (which is the most loathsome question you could ask—why bother to write the thing if you then have to explain it? It is what it is) and if I were forced to answer, I would say, "It's about things.

the story is not a pretty one. there is violence in it. And cruelty. But stories that are not pretty have a certain value, too, I suppose. Everything, as you well know (having lived in this world long enough to have figured out a thing or two for yourself), cannont always be sweetness and light.

Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.

I lay there and thought how life was like a Littmus Lozenge, how the sweet and the sad were all mixed up together and how hard it was to separate them out. It was confusing.

We are none of us one thing alone and unchanging. We are not static, or at rest. Just as a city or a prince's court or a lineage is many people in one, so is a person many people within one, always unfinished and always like a river's current flowing onward ever changing toward the ocean that is greater than all things combined.

But aren't all of us like a fine weaving? The pattern the world sees often hides the threads." Tess

War was so simple, wasn't it? Much simpler than justice.

I don't know," said Diana. "I gave up a long time ago trying to decide whether we're ever ourselves or are only playing roles. And who could tell which the role was, the passionate kisser or the ruthless conqueror? Maybe they both are roles. Or maybe they're both true. Can't two contradictory things exist inside one person?

Belle laide, Athénaïs calls me,' I replied with a little shrug. The expression was usually used to describe a woman who was arresting despite the plainness of her looks.

You can't explain a degree to a dog

How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender – coupled with the perversions of age and the randomness of everything?

Guys rarely behave logically when it comes to women.

I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

It's crazy isn't it? She shook her head. You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful. She shook her head again. It's crazy.

There is nothing more difficult than simplicity, and therefore, nothing more refined.

I have about a hundred cats living in me and all of them are curious

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.