Quotes About Complexity

There are two kinds of marriages: the ones where you're privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you're not.

I wonder if they are the only three in the world: the man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours.

There are two kinds of marriages," Barbara said. "The ones where you're privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you're not.

Both the lyrics and melody were straightforward, and though I wasn't knowledgeable about what was going on with his guitar, the other instruments, or the backup vocals, the song was pleasurable to listen to at the same time that it was devastatingly sad. Was Noah Brewster himself sad? With that hair and those big white teeth?

And if I was looking at that, would I pick you out from everyone else and say, 'That's the most gorgeous woman I've ever seen'? If I'm being honest, no. But human beings aren't static images. We're dynamic and kinetic, and it's like I said before—right away, I wanted to talk to you, and every time I've talked to you since I've always wanted to keep talking to you.

Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to be all sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they're all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren't flawless but also aren't ridiculous or incompetent at life.

You never know the nature of another couple's marriage, do you?

Un uomo? -risposi ridendo- Un uomo è cosa ancor più triste e più orrenda di questo mucchio di carne sfatta. Un uomo è orgolgio, crudeltà, tradimento, viltà, violenza. La carne sfatta è tristezza, pudore, paura, rimorso, speranza. Un uomo, un uomo vivo, è poca cosa, in confronto di un mucchio di carne marcia.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...

The final mystery is one mystery. But the manifestations are many.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.

the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.

Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason.

There had come into his forehead a knitting of the brows which was becoming habitual with him, particularly when he was with Miriam. She longed to smooth it away, and she was afraid of it. It seemed the stamp of a man who was not her man in Paul Morel.

All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they're babies, just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in men!

Every half-truth at length produces the contradiction of itself in the opposite half-truth.

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

The self has no sign of itself... For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is seen not as wonderful but as something that can be explained as a dyadic system.