Quotes About Complexity

Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels?

real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.

Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand - all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once.

The monolithic problem of depression cannot be expressed with a monolithic response; depressions are contextual and must be interpreted within the contexts in which they occur.

In the twentieth century, homosexuality was said to be caused by overbearing mothers and passive fathers; schizophrenia reflected the parents' unconscious wish that their child did not exist; and autism was the result of "refrigerator mothers," whose coldness doomed their children to a fortress of silence. We've now realized that such complex and overdetermined conditions are not the result of parental attitude or behavior.

Problemele lor sunt cu adev?rat grave ?i, chiar dac? nu pricepem de ce, trebuie s? accept?m gravitatea acestei chestiuni.

When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it.

Here is what we need to discover about power: it is both better and worse than we could imagine.

you can't search for wisdom--at least, not online. And it's as rare and precious as ever--maybe, given how complex our lives have become, rarer and more precious than before.

Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.

She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give. (Lena, 194)

She wasn't sure if he wanted more from her or if he wanted less. Maybe it was both. Maybe it was always both.

A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.

She'd loved him as much as he'd let her. More than he'd let her.

How is it that a person could be so relieved and so disappointed, both at the same time.

Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and lt me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.

There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and the kind who don't.

The idea of love was always easier than the practice of it.

Why was it there were some things you could have multiples of, like daughters and sisters, and other things you didn't, like fathers and husbands?

Love is unpredictable. It can be painful. It can be wonderful.

Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.