Quotes About Complexity

He's like a man who's married a whore: he knows she's a whore, but he loves her just the same.

My life had become so dichotomized and compartmentalized, so off the tracks that I barely understood it myself. I couldn't tell him that Spade was Jekyll and Hyde, two men trapped inside one six-foot-three roiling meat suit. Nothing about my life was suited for picnic talk.

I remembered this guy. Spade was the sixty-year-old version of the boys I had found irresistible in high school: brilliant, misunderstood, full of shit, and deeply sexy in a way that only I could appreciate. I felt a low gyration start in my hips that I hadn't felt in years.

I didn't understand what he was doing, what he wanted from me. Because in my experience, people wanted something from each other. To use them, to gain friendship, for a romantic relationship. I didn't think he had any of those three as his motivation, and it was like a Rubik's Cube that I kept turning around and around with no solution

If a thinker throws off too many unsystematic and rich insights, there is no place to grab onto his thought. The thing he is trying to illuminate seems as elusive as before.

Naively, one may suppose those at the Top who take decisions are poly­mathic supermen, somehow qualified to assess the many-sided implications of their decisions. Acquaintance with any of them dispels such illusions.

There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

I don't know. There isn't always an explanation for everything.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

He's so damned nice and he's so awful. He's my sort of thing.

You're awfully dark, brother, he said. You don't know how dark.

Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring… But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

I was a little crazy. But I wasn't crazy in any complicated manner.

It's funny,' I said. 'It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun, too, to be in love.' 'Do you think so?' her eyes looked flat again. 'I don't mean fun in that way. In a way it's an enjoyable feeling.' 'No,' she said. 'I think it's hell on earth.

He smiled as only the truly shy can smile. It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a mine, that is within them.

Also, he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister.

She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly

But, then, nothing is easy.

You have anything else eating you?" "Just in general." "How?" "Well I'm half crazy and you're half crazy and then we've got this crew of half saints and desperate men." "It isn't bad to be half saint and half desperate man.

But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that.

I'm going back to Mike." I could feel her crying as I held her close. "He's so damned nice and he's so awful. He's my sort of thing.