Quotes About Complexity

Things would be so easy if it wasn't for feelings.

My father knew he was a bastard. He was the venomous serpent in a bed of roses. Apparently, he didn't just acknowledge that fact, he beat people over the head with it. All that was missing was a neon sign that read EVIL AND CONFLICTED ABOUT IT with a flashing arrow pointing at his head.

You're a fucking mess," Curran's voice said.

you would think I was cruel, so I hesitated." "You are cruel." "Yes, but it doesn't mean I want you to think I am.

I had learned that life was a vicious bitch and people were complicated. They lied to themselves.

The human mind is infinitely complex. We make a myriad of decisions without even realizing it. Something causes us to roll the pen between our fingers while we're thinking.

Knowing too much about the future made things more complicated, not less.

From such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

Sex comes to most of us with a twist.

There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.

He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.

And he thought, I shall go on blindly and secretly jumbling all these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some such inescapable burden. That is being human. A very weird affair.

Of course I love Arnold, but I can hate him too, and it can go along with love that one never forgives certain things.

darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.

Understanding was out of the question; and indeed how passionately, just then, I did not want to be understood.

the superiority of some infinite reserve and the mystery of some infinite sadness.

What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man's searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.

Her love for men had always been somehow neurotic and unfulfilled.

To find someone — oh yes — that is the problem. To have mutual love, that is so difficult indeed.

But you are metaphysical, Otto. You ought to think about her in more simple terms.

Parvati's oriental ability to see that everything was, from a certain point of view, everything else, baffled and charmed his Aristotelian western mind.