Quotes About Complexity

I'm not saying they're gods or anything of the kind. It's that we don't know how their minds work. We can't judge them by ourselves.

I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.

The finger-biter's feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree—they may have started in something real, but she'd tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

Intelligent men think up ways to get themselves in tangles a stupid man would never imagine.

Adulthood isn't black and white - it's a thousand shades of grey. Or taupe. It's not who you are, it's where you are.

love is...you get confused and you do stuff you don't mean to do-and you just-you hate yourself and sometimes you don't even want to love the person you do because it would be so much easier if you didn't.But you just-you just do.

All the things I've thought about love are true. It's beautiful and terrible and it doesn't make things perfect. It ends things, and it brings beginnings. This is mine.

I think love is huge, overwhelming. I think it's terrible and beautiful.

God and monster all in one, and mine to worship. ~Kyla

In all the photos I see the boy I once knew and the man he became, a flawed but decent man whom I grew to care about in a more complicated way than I had ever cared about the boy.

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do. Even Jesus wrestled with that. But I think - I think the ability to receive love is as important as the ability to give it. It's one and the same really.

God, Olive, you're a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you. So if you don't mind, Olive, maybe you could be a little less Olive with me, even if it means being a little more Olive with others. Because I love you, and we don't have much time.

Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.

This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.

we never know, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that.

Well, this, and this, and this have happened. It would not be accurate as told. She thought nothing could be told and be accurate. Feeble words dropped earnestly and haphazardly over the large stretched-out fabric of a life with all its knots and bumps— What words would she use to spread her experience before him?

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately.

Pam era convinta che fosse impossibile raccontare qualcosa in maniera fedele. Fragili parole sincere cadevano a casaccio sopra l'ampia distesa del tessuto di una vita, con tutti i suoi nodi e irregolarità.

Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

If the nation's economists were laid end to end, they would point in all directions.

The credit for defining the artist as a person who can hold two inconsistent ideas at once goes to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The credit for realizing that that is precisely what all modern men can do—indeed, must be able to do— belongs to Sir Walter Scott.

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.