Quotes About Complexity

The world stood pinned on two thorns. One was ugliness. One was beauty. The truth did not lie in the middle or at either extreme. The truth encompassed both. *

For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools.

He made a noise she recognized, one that meant he was organizing whatever multidimensional information lattices inhabited his mental space into linear strings amenable to transmission through that inadequate medium, language.

Electricity is a remarkably simple—though dangerous—animal.

Sweet death in a vacuum, why can't anybody be uncomplicatedly evil in real life? Or uncomplicatedly good? Why are we all such a twist of good and bad decisions, selfishness and self-justification, altruism and desire?

It was perfectly possible to love someone objectly when you could barely stand to be in the room with them. Of all the mysteries of life, Sebastien thought, that one might be the greatest.

Was one head dominant, or did they serve different functions?

Sometimes, even he found his program overly Gothic.

From here, she could observe the structure of the Jacob's Ladder. She had a confused idea of lattices and bulbous habitats, of corridors, threading asymmetrically over the surfaces of anchores and domaines. Of gray metal and patchy paint. Now she saw the world in all its incomprehensible vastness, like a grandly rotating three-dimensional spiderweb, and the complexity bewildered her.

He plays the white and black pieces both, a double game that defies all understanding.

Maybe you could feel all sorts of things, all of them mutually contradictory.

Her voice sounded hurt. The emotion might even be real. People are complicated.

Elena might think she was the saltspider at the center of the web, but Lesa couldn't allow her to recognize all the layers of machinations here.

Humans were interesting to Nova, and perhaps the most interesting things about them was their contradictions-so fragile and so tenuous.

Exalt humans were more robust than Mean ones, but they were still human.

Am I just a sufficiently complicated and randomized construct that I adequately simulate intelligence? Or am I just a mock-up?

It was a morally complex equation.

I don't know, even now, if that was honesty or a guilt trip. Or maybe sometimes a thing can be both.

People are so complicated.

Mallory reached across Perceval's lap and stroked Rien's sweat-cold cheek. This touch, Rien did not flinch from. Perceval swallowed, an acrid pain of jealousy.

My eyes don't quite glaze over when he starts talking about eleven-dimensional reality.

The concept of tourism has changed with industrialization, yes, and standardization," said Harms. "You don't see any difference anymore between one place and another. It's easier to build that way and provide standard service, but how can you preserve a sense of place and culture? The complexity of the tourism industry works against sustainability.

What you want is the whole of me—isn't it, isn't it? —and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.