Quotes About Complexity

Smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.

Although I maintain that if she were more perfect, she would be less interesting.

I suppose you do love me, in your way," I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. "And how else should I love you —in your way?" he asked. I am still thinking about that.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

Love does not make me gentle or kind.

Nighthawks I wanted to run away with you tonight but you are a difficult woman the rules of you - Past and future circle round us now we know more now less in the institute of shadows. On a street black as widows with nothing to confess our distances found us the rules of you - so difficult a woman I wanted to run away with you tonight.

Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.

English is a bitch

Like two particles in a complex sentence we sit side by side moving forward, eyes on the road. Parataxis is a charged instant of language cold on the surface, unexplained underneath.

Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.

And, by the way, we all consider sleeping with the bad man – we want to fix his hurt, or we want him to hurt us – one way or another, we are all attracted to the shadow.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.

The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means "to speak of all kinds of things." It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem to be connected but actually are; that no event occurs in isolation; that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point; and that the storyteller is likely to be rather long-winded.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

A tangle, you know, is more powerful than a single thread alone.

Can one be both barbarian of the soul and sophisticated of the mind?

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.

Language is verbalizing the non-verbal. (That's what makes it so complicated.) Holding hands is better than saying "I love you.

Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.

It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

web of a drunken spider.

Generalization is impossible. It is an insult.

It takes time to see the desert; you have to keep looking at it. When you've looked long neough, you realise the blank wastes of sand and rock are teemming with life. Just as you can keep looking at a person and suddenly realise that the way you see them has completely changed: from being a stranger, they've gradually revealed themselves as someone with a wealth of complexities and surprising subtleties that you're growing to love.

Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn't a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.