Quotes About Complexity

Who can know the heart of a man?

People's lives in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize. I don't believe so.

I am a woman of violent contradiction.

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be /made happy/. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of her -- was that something that could just be picked up and /made happy/?

Peoples lives, in Jubilee and elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

Sex meant nothing to him, or at any rate it did not mean what it meant (had meant) to her...

Ora non credo piú che la gente abbia segreti precisi e comunicabili, né sentimenti esuberanti e facili da riconoscere. Non ci credo piú.

Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions

but, he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

It was ugly and precious all at once.

this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

Ain't nothing wrong with Shug Avery. She just sick. Sicker than anybody I ever seen. She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.

She was beginning to think that human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared used up, dusty and dry.

She was never thought of as a pretty girl. People might say she looked interesting, mysterious, older than her years and therefore intriguing, but she was considered approaching beautiful only when she looked sad.

An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.

The many identities you hold and your lived experiences are not in conflict with each other; they make you sharp, whole, and extraordinary.

We are all more–and less–than what we seem.

I believe what I choose. I am not as simple as I seem. Now go!

It is an illusion that once upon a time managers could make their direct reports do whatever was needed. Nobody has ever had enough authority—they never have and never will. Organizational life is too complicated for that.

He could explain away the mechanical, but the inner workings of the soul eluded him