Quotes About Complexity

I never know what I mean in my telegrams – especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.

sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.

It seemed to him that he both knew too much to imagine [the child's] simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.

One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable—embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak?

There were complications, there were questions; but they were so much more together than they were anything else.

Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast-- so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech.

There was something between them. There was everything.

Avete ragione che Millie non è facile a conoscere. Uno la vede, con intensità: la vede più di quanto non veda nessun altro; ma poi scopre che ciò non significa conoscerla, e che si può conoscere meglio una persona che non si riesca, diciamo, a vedere neppure appena la metà.

She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know. Ah, she's a thousand and one things!

The" thing was the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was—the implication here was complete. Not

But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.

Per me, soggiunse, - uno può amare una cosa o non amarla, non si può amar tutto, evidentemente: ma non si può neppur tentare di farsene una ragione, non si sa dove questo possa condurre. Ci son sentimenti buoni che possono avere cattivissime ragioni. non vi pare, e cattivi che ne vantano di buonissime.

Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations—unless indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.

It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.

Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language subject to varieties of interpretation. What

But that is another matter. There is really too much to say.

Una novela es una cosa viva, toda una y continua, como cualquier otro organismo, y en proporción a como vive se descubrirá, creo yo, que en cada una de las partes hay algo de cada una de las demás partes.

There isn't a thing I can imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it backward for its sweet simplicity.

Goethe recommended seeing human nature in the most various forms, and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe perfectly splendid.

Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand.

Mr. Longdon gave a headshake that was both sad and sharp. "It's all wrong. But YOU'RE all right!" he added in a different tone as he walked hastily away.

But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.

The Turn of the Screw" has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story.

Living with a whore--even the best whore in the world--isn't a bed of roses.