Quotes About Complexity

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend

Has it ever occurred to you [...] that by the year 2050...not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

By the end he was living in each chapter of his life simultaneously—Kennedy and Obama, Vietnam and Bosnia and Afghanistan—as if he were floating in a single body of water whose temperature varied from place to place and depth to depth. All that accumulated experience—we Americans don't want it. We're almost embarrassed by it, except when we're burying it.

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.

Oh, woman, woman! (...) Thou art a mystery, an abyss, and he who thinks to know thee is totally mad.

We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dresssing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow.

Art is a reminder that you actually do contain multitudes--and that's OK.

Who am I? Everybody. As Whitman said: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding. And these individuals resemble the individuals who flicker on and off within you. This is the idea on which fiction is built.

Language is a meaning approximator that sometimes gets too big for its britches and deceives us

I was thinking the other day about the idea that you have a reader and a writer, and they're different and they're flawed and they're fucked-up, each in their own way.

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.

Isn't it interesting that—in the English language, at least—there's a word for making things simple ("simplification" or "simplify"), but no word for making things easy or fun.

El amor más intenso, quizá más débil que el odio, es una negociación, nunca concluyente, entre soledades.

El escritor de hoy tiende a usar cada vez menos palabras y cada vez más simples, tanto porque la cultura de masas ha diluido el concepto de cultura literaria como porque la suma de realidades que el lenguaje podía expresar de forma necesaria y suficiente ha disminuido de manera alarmante.

Los idiolectos del pensamiento, las privacidades de lo no dicho son de un orden mucho más profundo e inalcanzable.

That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words…and it is true that words, their labyrinths, the exhausting immensity of their "possibles", in short their treachery, have something of quicksand about them.

An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences.

Outside, people were walking quickly, their hands in their pockets, their faces stiff with cold, all with their own little affairs, their own little concerns in their heads, all with their personal dramas, their need to do something.

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon

I don't know how it is...but you seem to think me something wonderful, and indeed, I am not.