Quotes About Complexity

I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past--a combination of both.

This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity.

Women? Women are like...thunderstorms. They're beautiful to look at, and sometimes they're nice to listen to-but most of the time they're just plain inconvenient.

Vin isn't…like other women." Tindwyl raised an eyebrow, her voice softening slightly. "I think that the more women you come to know, Your Majesty, the more you'll find that statement applies to all of them.

I'm an amalgamation of what I've needed to be. Part scholar, part rebel, part nobleman, part Mistborn, and part soldier. Sometimes I don't even know myself. I had a devil of a time getting all those pieces to work together. And, just when I'm starting to get it figured out, the world up and ends on me.

Humans don't make sense." "If you're only now learning that," Kaladin said, "then you haven't been paying attention.

You've managed-- in our short three years together-- to kill not only my god, but my father, my brother, and my fiance. That's kind of like a homicidal hat trick. It's a strange foundation for a relationship, wouldn't you say?

I'm not good with relationships, Shallan." "Is there anyone who actually is? I mean, is there really someone out there who looks at relationships and thinks, 'You know what, I've got this'? Personally, I rather think we're all collectively idiots about it.

A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground.

I'm wondering if every person I pass has similar depths, and if there's any way to avoid the mistake of judging them so shallowly that I'm rocked when they show their true complexity.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

Oh, but I'm a scholar. I enjoy things with curious properties, and stupidity is most interesting. The more you study it, the further it flees—and yet the more of it you obtain, the less you understand about it!

When we are young," Jasnah said, "we want simple answers. There is no greater indication of youth, perhaps, than the desire for everything to be as it should. As it has ever been.

People were just too complex to reduce to simple personality traits.

I didn't say Tvlakv isn't a bastard. He's just a likable bastard." He hesitated, then grimaced. "Those are the worst kind. When you kill them, you end up feeling guilty for it.

He was protecting. He was saving. Yet he was killing. How could something so terrible be so beautiful at the same time?

Humans don't have programming." "Yes you do. You have too much of it. Conflicting programs, none of it interfacing properly, all calling different functions at the same time—or the same function for contradictory reasons. Yet you ignore it sometimes. That is not a flaw. It is what makes you you.

What I'm trying to say is that you don't understand a man until you understand what makes him do what he does. Every man is a hero in his own story, Princess.

I'm like that," she said. "Wild mood swings. It makes me more interesting.

Navani Kholin was not some timid, perfect ideal. She was a sour storm of a woman, set in her ways, stubborn as a boulder rolling down a mountain, and increasingly impatient with things she considered foolish. He loved her the most for that.

I'm so storming clever that half the time, even I can't follow what I'm talking about.

Why did it seem that the more he demonstrated himself to be an idiot, the more convinced people became that he had some kind of hidden depths?

Easy to dimiss, perhaps, but difficult to hate.

My little Jasnah, insufferable and wonderful.