Quotes About Complexity

We love each other, that's true whatever it means, but we aren't good at it; for some it's a talent, for others only an addiction.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Why are you so interested in amoebas? Oh, they're immortal, he said, and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.

The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

Just because people are related to you doesn't mean you love them

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.

I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves.

I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Even guppies have their opacities.

Messy love is better than none. I guess. I'm no authority on sane living.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described

It's impossible to say something exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, because what you say can never be exact, you will always leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could be this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

His face is long and mournful, like a sheep's, but with the large full eyes of a dog, spaniel not terrier. His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.

To recount these histories is like unravelling a thread: one means only to tell one little part, but then another comes in, and another, for they are all part of the same garment — Tudor, Lancaster, York, Plantagenet.

Roman noticed that both women seemed instinctively opposed to the idea. "David's the logical choice," said Ulrike. Eric and Cliff protested, but Rikki overrode them. "It's less complicated.

Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.

Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?

SCARLETT O'HARA WAS NOT BEAUTIFUL