Quotes About Complexity

You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why - knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way - why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met.

And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites," he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!

She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that?

A good novel is one that shows complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all those characters to have a voice, in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature is is so.

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them…

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless.

Un grande romanzo acuisce le vostre percezioni, vi fa sentire la complessità della vita e degli individui, e vi difende dall'ipocrita certezza della validità delle vostre opinioni, nella morale a compartimenti stagni.

They come from a long line of defiant heroines, including Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre. These women create the main complications of the plot, through their refusal to comply. They are more complicated than the later, more obviously revolutionary, heroines of the twentieth century, because they make no claims to be radical.

Even the most complex math can be broken into a sequence of trivial steps. Each of these slaves has been trained to complete specific equations in an assembly-line fashion. When taken together, this collective human mind is capable of remarkable feats. Holtzman surveyed the room as if he expected his solvers to give him a resounding cheer. Instead, they studied their work with heavy-lidded eyes, moving through equation after equation with no comprehension of reasons or larger pictures.

This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it.

What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already.

Issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

It's sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, and worried about him, I was glad not to have to live with him. I just left him to himself and never looked back.

If my father hadn't exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening. My

En ese mundo —de cadenas de suministro globales, transferencias de capital instantáneas, redes terroristas transnacionales, cambio climático, migraciones masivas y cada vez mayor complejidad— aprenderemos a convivir, a cooperar los unos con los otros y a reconocer la dignidad de los demás, o pereceremos.

El mundo es complicado, Bar. Por eso es interesante.»

The most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it's possible to connect with some[one] else even though they're very different from you.

This idea of purity and you're never compromised, you're always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.

Rarely do your efforts bear fruit right away; the scale of most problems coming across your desk is too big for that, the factors at play too varied.

If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.

People were harder than horses. They hid their feeling. Or shut them off. (pg. 116)

you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece

Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.