Quotes About Complexity

A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

in a voice with half the steps missing.

She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting. I

An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. Light

She had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blond, that hasn't enough life in it to be ginger, and isn't clean enough to be grey.

I'm beginning to get it," I said slowly. "Take a family like yours and somebody in it has to be the dark meat.

Still, few things of worth are ever simple. Or easy.

few things of worth are ever simple. Or easy.' Tomas

The ways of the heart are complex." He looked out at the ocean again. "The waves churn and break upon the rocks, Talon. So do human feelings. Passion can be a man's undoing. With passion must come wisdom; otherwise, your enemies have a weapon to use against you.

The order of the universe is like a gem with many facets, and we see only one, that which reflects the existence of our own world.

He had been gorgeous to look at and deadly to live with.

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

you don't have the memory of your future; {that}the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine.

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism.

What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether

128We want both, to burn it down and be no one and to be recognized by the dog on the daily walk up the drive from work and we get both but never exactly when and how we imagined it.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes

You can't assume that you know why what you're doing matters. You can't at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.

Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it[.]

Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

The boiling point of water is straightfoward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.

But there isn't actually a most beautiful person in the world, because there are so many kinds of beauty.

Don't think this means I'm giving you all my secrets. There is more to me than you will ever know.