Quotes About Complexity

Nell'amore, comunque si manifesti, siamo più grandi della somma delle nostre parti.

And it is possible to love more than one person.

there is no saying how events in one place may affect what happens elsewhere, for the tapestry of history is woven of many threads.

guess a woman can either love or be loved, but it's almost impossible to have both.

Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually fallible.

Elu jaatamine pole muud kui teatavat sorti mõte surmast. See pole ei vastandumine ega ka ükskõiksus surma suhtes. Tõepoolest, võiks peaaegu öelda et midagi vastupidist, kui see poleks omakorda liiga lihtne vastandumisele järele andmine

simply one problem among others.

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.

Afghanistan, one of the most inconspicuous nations on earth. In 1946 it was just emerging from the bronze age, a land incredibly old, incredibly tied to an ancient past. At the embassy we used to say, "Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus.

That's the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.

LIFE is simple. Being is simple. The universe is simple. Complexity arises in ignorance and self-delusion.

It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

You can't see yourself all over. But I can. Part of you is honey, part of you is copper, some of you is gold--

But he had the tendency of all wildly disorganised people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own.

she was disquietingly fluid—fluid without, however, being able to flow. I felt a hardness and a constriction in her, a grave mistrust, created already by too many men like me ever to be conquered now.

Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs--which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.