Quotes About Complexity

I knew him the least well, understood him scarcely at all, felt uneasy in his presence, and yet perhaps in a strange way loved him more deeply than any.

I'm aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I'd ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I've glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I've sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.

As tempting as it is, you can't put a naturally occurring phenomenon such as the life of a person or a country into discrete units.

the more you try to get reality to fit within your comfort zone, the more unprepared you are to deal with a world full of surprise, complexity, and change. Likewise, if we persist in trying to get our relationships to conform to our expectations instead of letting them be how they actually are, we may miss important opportunities to know ourselves and others more deeply.

The devices meant to simplify our lives merely create new and improved complexities.

Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking Him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.

Life is real, in all its complexity. And though it can be painfully difficult, it can also be unspeakably wonderful.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter.

I believe I have you to thank for reminding me that pictures on an urn, though lovely, are not real. Life is real, in all its complexity. And though it can be painfully difficult, it can also be unspeakably wonderful.

sublimely human, isn't it? Not unsullied genetic

Twentieth-century philosophy is not unique in its ability to confuse puzzles with problems.

How many knots can the psyche tie itself into to defend itself against moral truth?

Country living—and definitely living in the country with a lot of animals—isn't peaceful. It's full of blood and guts and murder and rivalry and treachery and chaos, in a lovely green pitiless world.

In a sense, then, the number of orchid species on the planet is uncountable because it is constantly changing.

I did not bother to explain myself. It would have taken months. Years.

People think I'm much more than I am.

I know the sort of man who likes me. So I wondered, not for the first time, what secret I might possess, what magic charm or talisman had allowed me to get Malloy's attention in the first place. To get him to fuck me. I am not the kind of woman he likes.

Men are often like that. They grow bored with simple goodness and want a woman who is dangerous, a challenge.

Fiction, also--if done well--can perhaps allow the reader a greater feeling of recognition with people of the past. If we read a novel about people trying to control the Revolution, we're reading about them as people who have desires, ambitions, and neuroses just like ours, and we can relate to them, rather than seeing them just as stiff portraits with funny-looking hair--or as the one-dimensional monsters or saints that many pop histories have made them.

The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.

You're the very nicest jerk I know.

What about Gale?" "He's not a bad kisser either," I say shortly. "And it was okay with both of us? You kissing the other?" He asks. "No. It wasn't okay with either of you. But I wasn't asking your permission," I tell him. Peeta laughs again, coldly, dismissively. "Well, you're a piece of work, aren't you?

You know, you're kind of squeamish for such a lethal person

for some reason Gale and Peeta do not coexist well in my thoughts.