Quotes About Complexity

Everything was always something, but something—and here was the rub—could never be everything.

One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic

They saw him as he was, a full man whose griefs and solaces and talents ran together.

Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.

Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth's mind are connected.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

Our lives are Mobius strips, misery and wonder simultaneously. Our destinies are infinite, and infinitely recurring.

For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a "sensationalist" rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

Because nothing between human beings isn't uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

This web of intricate connections

Yet, as a sympathetic biographer, shall I suggest, this outspoken young woman is not so innocent as she imagines herself?

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.

She sounds... cruel. There were many sides to Grace, Fiske said. ... Beatrice leaned closer to the screen. Grace made her own husband, Nathaniel Harford, an Outcast.

That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.

Life is a series of unlikely events, isn't it? Hers certainly is. One unlikely event after another, adding up to a rich, complicated whole. And who knows what's still to come?

Sometimes I feel grown up and other times I feel like a little kid. I seem to be more than one person.

Woman is a miracle of divine contradictions