Quotes About Complexity

Often you don't know whether a woman is friend, enemy or lover until it is too late. Sometimes, she is all three.

The thing about smart mother fuckers is that sometimes, they sound like crazy mother fuckers to stupid mother fuckers...

and he was too dense—and, in recent months, too drunk—to follow Mother into what T.S. Eliot had called, in his poem "Gerontion," "the wilderness of mirrors.

There is so much good in the worst of us, an so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us not to talk about the rest of us.

Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.

Relativity, he reflected, was simple compared to the mysteries of Eros.

An intelligent adult often feels it is demeaning to pay attention to simplistic definitions.

Less is a bore.

Viva ambiguity acknowledged unambiguously!

This is what I think, but I don't say the words because the counterpoint of yes and no, love and hate, fear and longing, the need to tear down and the need to build up are synonymous and one.

For hours and days he sought out ways to make unintelligible the obvious, and to find for things easily understood an inexplicable basis. --Thoughts on Cezanne

Is it our calling to understand each other, or are we not, rather, called upon to misjudge one another, to prevent there being a surfeit of happiness and to ensure that happiness continues to be valued, and that these circumstances result in novels, which could not possibly exist if we all knew each other for what we are

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors...who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.

How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a Ph.D. would lead one to believe!

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two sides to him.

It was infinitely easier to deal with the complications of intracellular life than the uncertainties of child rearing.

It is problematic because, taken together, the whole--composed of lies and truth--forms a truth of its own.

puso nuestro talento natural al servicio de una orgía de complejidad, superficialidad y distracciones tecnológicas.

Sort of pregnant. Sort of dead. Sort of Jewish. These are impossibles.