Quotes About Complexity

When you could dissect something and find all the answers, you could find all the wrong ones

A case was a jigsaw puzzle to him, and he never tired of shifting through the pieces.

She's going to have to be more than smart. She'll have to be brilliant. She is. That's what makes her a pain in the ass. Stuck on her, are you? David waved the comment away. Sorry. Too personal. I was wondering if you were asking as a corporate suit, an associate or as the guy who's dating her mother. I was aiming toward friend.

This was supposed to be easy. Why isn't it?

She glanced at the papers he'd been working on. Black and white. He wouldn't see the shades of gray she saw there. The man they sought was a killer. The state of his mind, his emotions, perhaps even his soul, didn't matter to Ben. Maybe they couldn't.

who hated as passionately as she loved, who asked questions that couldn't be answered, who

Don't complicate the simple, Lenore, he told her thinking aloud. It usually manages to complicate itself.

Don't complicate the simple, Lenore, he told her, thinking aloud. It usually manages to complicate itself. ---Nora Roberts Second Nature

Everything that is can't be understood. Everything that's understood can't be explained.

Friendship...is like pain. Explaining it is impossible.

former atheist and astronomer Alan Sandage, said, "As I said before, the world is too complicated in all of its parts to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. . . . The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some kind of organizing principle—an architect for believers.

You can love completely without complete understanding.

you can love completely without complete understanding. That I have known and preached. my father said.

In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he's a morlock — but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for

Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you.

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn't there.

It is crazy," said the nervous little man I'd followed up the street. "That's the only thing you learn in law school that's useful: Laws are crazy on purpose. Everything is negotiable. If you make a law complicated enough, you can apply it any way you want. You just need to make sure it's so complicated that no normal person can understand it, unless they went to law school.

History is defined by people who don't really understand what they are defining

Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.

More than one side? You're Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!