Quotes About Complexity

Are you implying,' said Philippa coldly, 'that I enjoyed being brought up surrounded by eunuchs?' 'No,' said Lymond. 'But I expect you enjoyed it more than the eunuchs did.

What is your principal characteristic, would you say?' 'Treacherousness,' said Danny, gloriously. 'That,' said Lymond pleasantly, 'is everyone's principal characteristic.

Acrostics in French or acrostics in Hebrew were still Greek to him.

So this was Richard's brother. Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise, with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent. He returned the scrutiny without rancour.

It's true? You have no interest in him? But everyone either abominates Francis Crawford or longs to possess him. I wonder why you alone should be immune.

We're all runts and bastards of one sort or another.

In Francis, there was so much that was admirable; and the flaws were so great. Yet one forgot them.

She could say that no longer. She was his wife in nothing but name: the privacies of his nature were not hers to explore and to analyse: she kept him as far as possible out of her thoughts, and conjecture out of his affairs. Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.

I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.

Like all male creatures Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom.

But the worse you express yourself these days the more profound people think you--though that's nothing new.

this plain, sulky, inarticulate girl, who had never had any

The whole question is extraordinarily complicated because of the gulf that has grown up between art on the one hand and on the other hand both the Church and secular society, so that the artists tend to be out of touch with the common man, while the latter, whether Christian or not, has only a very fumbling critical judgment to rely on.

Es una lástima que el brillo de los ojos de una persona solo sea el brillo de los ojos de una persona, y que uno no pueda descifrar con una sola mirada qué lo produce.

Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks... But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.

Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.

He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

It [Darwin's theory of evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

It gives me my headache just trying to think down to your level

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.