Quotes About Complexity

It may be all right, you may have talked about it and agreed it was all right, but that's not how sex works, is it? It's where the unsayable is king; it's where madness and surprise rule; it's where the cheques you write for ecstasy are drawn on the bank of despair.

he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included the sense of richer, denser, more complicated, with focus and echo. Half his brain pulsed with gawping incredulity at his luck; the other half was filled with a sense of long-sought, flaming reality. That was the word: falling in love with Martha made things real.

Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all. You trust the mystifier more if you know his deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You would trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.

Voleo bih da je život kao bankarstvo', rekao sam. 'Ne mislim doslovno. Ima tu vrlo komplikovanih stvari. Ali, na kraju sve shvatiš ako se samo potrudiš. Ili uvek postoji negde neko ko se razume, pa makar i naknadno, kad je ve? kasno. Nevolja sa životom, kako se meni ?ini, jeste da može ve? za sve da bude kasno, a da ti ipak i dalje ništa ne shvataš.

You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.

And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.

Due altre cose ha detto nel corso degli anni: che certe donne non sono affatto misteriose ma vengono rese tali dall'incapacità degli uomini di capirle. da Il senso di una fine

But then we learn something else: that the brain doesm't like to be typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As it it's saying: Don't imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline--life's much more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory loops.

I know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated—or rather, sex-free—for almost twenty years; but I haven't pressed her for reasons or particulars.

that there were some women who aren't at all mysterious, but are only made so by men's inability to understand them.

What he didn't – or couldn't – tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger.

Lies are so complicated, she thought. And not for the first time.

vapidity was an excellent disguise for many qualities.

He loved her, yet knew he'd go to his grave without having any understanding of what went on inside her mind.

You're the most confusing woman," he whispered on a sigh. "God help me, I do love you, though.

Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual.

I have never looked to religion for comfort—belief is just not in my genes. But reading Mastering the Art of French Cooking—childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting—I thought this was what prayer must feel like.

Real life is not quite as it is in stories. In the old tales, bad things happen, and when the tale has unfolded and come to its triumphant conclusion, it is as if the bad things had never been. Life is not as simple as that, not quite.

Tales within tales. Dreams within dreams. Pattern on pattern and path beyond path. For such short-lived folks, the human kind seem determined to make things as complicated as possible for themselves.

A tale can start in many ways. Thus, it is many tales, and at the same time each of these is but one way of telling the same story.

Her kind will tell you there is no black and white, only shadows. That any way can be wrong or right, that good and evil are two sides of the same coin. Believe her if you will. Perhaps she tells the truth

Perhaps nothing is so wounding to a writer than being accused of having written something that hurts a child. Censorship is an attitude of mistrust and suspicion that seeks to deprive the human experience of mystery and complexity. But without mystery and complexity there is no wonder; there is no awe; there is no laughter.