Quotes About Complexity

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing - being right - gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

There are times when I think it's impossible to know another soul. I don't know, maybe we're lucky that way. If we knew what really went on inside other people's private hearts it would make our eyeballs bleed.

The point isn't to be the hero and solve things; the point of the leader in a complex world is to enable and unleash as many heroes and as many solutions as possible.

In a simpler world, perhaps unilateral power held by a single, smart, capable leader could rule the day. In a complex world, as we'll explore together, it takes a collective sharing of power, creativity, and perspectives to become agile and nuanced enough to lead into the uncertain future.

The key lever in a complex system is learning; the key methods are conversation, discovery, and experimentation.14 In a complicated case, you have distinct times for diagnosing the problem, coming up with the solution, and then implementing that solution.

Lizzie,' he said. It was only my name, but in it was all these different emotions at aonce. A prism in a word.

Having two women—one who can't know about the other, and one who must be trusted not to destroy his life—is clearly difficult for him.

Love: the impossible combination of being IN the deep end and being OFF the deep end.

Traps upon traps. And riddles upon riddles.

I am a human Rube Goldberg machine," he said. "I do simple things in complicated ways

This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.

Studying mutilated bodies was routine. Talking to me—apparently, that was hard.

That was the first time I'd said that last bit out loud. Toby Hawthorne loved my mother. She loved him. It had been an epic, seaside kind of love. Literally. Just knowing that made me feel like I'd been lying to myself every time I'd pretended that I didn't have feelings, that things didn't have to be messy.

My mind is more like a roller coaster inside a labyrinth buried in an M. C. Escher painting that is riding on another roller coaster.

Two," I said now, just as I had then, but this time I couldn't help wondering if Jameson was talking about a different kind of triangle—about him and Grayson and me.

If there's one thing the Hawthorne family isn't it's fine. They were a twisted, broken mess before you got here, and they'll be a twisted, broken mess once you're gone.

Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling—even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that.

She is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The same elements that are inside the rest of us, but I can't help thinking she's more that that and she's got other elements going on that on one's ever heard of, ones that make her stand apart from everybody else.

Violet Markey.There's more to you than meets the eye.

There aren't many people who would say this about me, but the great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.

I like to think that the colors and sounds and words have nothing to do with him, that they're all me and my own brilliant, complicated, buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, godlike brain" -Finch

But the great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.