Quotes About Complexity

Television is apparently the enemy of nuance. But nuance is essential for a thoughtful discussion.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.

London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It's a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces - fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.

There is no simple answer for what it means to be Canadian. There are a thousand answers that come together. But part of that is that there is a national mythology.

The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.

What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions.

It's like our relationship is always about the other side that isn't the obvious side.

From what I could tell, whenever an archangel or a burning bush turns up, it's generally not to say, 'Hey, go out and have a happy and uncomplicated life.

She unequivocally rejected his crimes, yet he was the father who, in her childhood memory, was loving—until he wasn't.

Svetlana's responses to her mother would always swing, unresolved, between sentimental idealizations and bitter anger.

I am difficult to love, and I know it. I never learned the unconditional part, so trust evades me. Add sex and I fall apart, eventually retreating back into the swamp. Very few people can put up with me, and I can't blame them. I am a constant contradiction. I annoy myself.

But the human mind was a labyrinth with as many dead ends as thruways,

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.

Some of us start out whole and stay that way. Some need a spare part or two. Henry - he was a bits-and-pieces kind of guy

She spoke with a kind of wilted gallantry. I looked at her. She'd leaned her head against the cracked leather seat, and closed her eyes. Without their light and depth in her face, she looked about thirteen. I caught myself up short, recognizing a feeling I'd had before. It started out as paternal sympathy but rapidly degenerated, if I let it. And Mildred had a husband.

Ross Macdonald

Strategy #5: Breaking the unsolved problem down into its component parts.

Difficulty seeing the "grays"; concrete, literal, black-and-white thinking Difficulty deviating from rules or routine Difficulty handling unpredictability, ambiguity, uncertainty, or novelty Difficulty shifting from original idea or solution Difficulty adapting to changes in plan or new rules Difficulty taking into account situational factors that would suggest the need to adjust a plan

Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures.

la monstruosa, la tormentosa, la irresistible capital del cheque. Rodeada de islas menores, tiene cerca a Jersey; y agarrada a Brooklyn

So this is the human condition: we're living longer, getting taller, and are a push of a finger away from every other person on the planet and yet we do not know how to run ourselves.