Quotes About Complexity

A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.

They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.

Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.

I've had only two regular women. I liked the small breakable thing inside each one. Whatever their personality, smarts, or looks, something soft lay inside each. Like a bird's breastbone, shaped and chosen to wish on. A little V, thinner than bone and lightly hinged, that I could break with a forefinger if I wanted to, but never did. Want to, I mean. Knowing it was there, hiding from me, was enough.

A perfect thing is not everything.

They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees also cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom; the arms that loaded sheaves, bales, and sacks rocked babies into sleep. They patted biscuits into flaky ovals of innocence—and shrouded the dead. They plowed all day and came home to nestle like plums under the limbs of their men.

And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes—a purée of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.

It took some time to figure out the motives for faking love—hers and theirs. Survival, she supposed, literal and emotional.

Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of "Recitatif" is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact they are both "somebody"—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies.

You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.

The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

The more varigated and complicated a society, the greater the chance that those at the top will be ignorant of the realities at the bottom. Efficiency should not be adduced to justify gross inequality.

A tak pokaždé, když nÄ›jaký trouba prohlásí, že Saddám Husajn je druhý Hitler, musíme se do sporu vložit a tyhle zjednoduÅ¡ující pitomosti zkomplikovat. RealitÄ› odpovídající zmatek je mnohem lepÅ¡í než elegantní nepravdy.

Life itself was far messier and didn't end so tidily with the heroine making the right match.

You have to live in the grey, or you have no kindness in your heart.

Kindness is not the same as niceness or putting our heads in the sand, or avoiding conflict. It is acknowledging that no life is as it seems on the surface. It is understanding that we never know all the layers in a life and choosing to speak and act from that difficult gray place in all of us.

Kindness is not the same as niceness, or putting our heads in the sand, or avoiding conflict. It is acknowledging that no life is as it seems on the surface. It is understanding that we never know all the layers in a life, and choosing to speak and act from that difficult gray place in all of us." ? Kerry Egan, On Living

The world is not black and white. There is no black and white. There's only gray. You have to live in the gray, or you got no kindness in your heart. You gotta see the gray.

I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.

More daunting is the natural technology of the brain itself. True North can simulate 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses. The human brain has some 100 million neurons and maybe up to 1 quadrillion synapses—all of which it runs at just 1/40,000 of the power it takes to keep a personal computer humming.

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

Things don't just happen, they have reasons. And the reasons have reasons. And the reasons for the reasons have reasons. And then the things that happen make other things happen, so they become reasons themselves. Nothing moves forward in a straight line, nothing is straightforward.

It's like the difference between a well-constructed ball of string and a raggedy old pile of knots. With the ball of string you can get hold of one end, slowly unravel it and eventually you'll find out where it comes from. But with the pile of knots you pull on one and the whole things moves at once. . . . The austere simplicity of fiction versus the tangled wool of fact. Who said that? Einstein again? . . . Or did I?

Quantum technologies are difficult to understand, but that will not stop the disruption this set of emerging technologies will bring in the next few years!