Quotes About Complexity

We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.

That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.

It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love.

The way she looks right now, you have to think about multiple car pile-ups. Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on. The way she looks, you'd have to think of mass graves to even log thirty seconds in the saddle. Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks.

But Rachel knows this isn't true. Nobody can stop anything. The people will always be humping next door. The burning cat will always be rocketing like a comet around every house in which they ever live. Nothing will ever be resolved.

Hay un montón de cosas que deseamos ignorar sobre la gente que queremos.

In the modern Oedipal story, it's the mother who kills the father and then takes the son.

Art, inspiration, love, they're all so easy to dissect. To explain away.

Because love is confusing and strange and difficult and uncomfortable and unbelievable inconvenient. But above all, love is transcendent.

La persona a la que quieres y la persona que te quiere nunca son la misma persona.

Every woman is just a different kind of problem.

the greatest proof of love's power is that it couldn't be reduced to words.

we're a blend, all of us, a cocktail peanut mix of niceness and badness, all bound up in a bundle of inexcusable indolence and ignorance punctuated by unanticipated moments of genuine heroism

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Most people aren't good or evil, really, they're just messy and complicated. Inside you are two wolves, and both of them are very confused about everything all of the time. So for the most part, give people a break when you can.

You think you know what the Department of Defense is spending? The Department of Defense doesn't even know what the Department of Defense is spending.

There would be a lot fewer of us screwing up the game of life so brilliantly, if there was always a right answer instead of just a best--or even a less bad--answer.

There were so many things mingled in his expression--yearning, disappointment, and yes, love.

Americans see everything too simply-a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.

You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.

It's hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time.

Americans see everything too simply—a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.

If you told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That's always the way.