Quotes About Complexity

We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.

I wasn't just a fuck to them, any of them probably, is what I'm seeing. For every girl I thought I was uncomplicated sex, it wasn't. Put it this way: if you can't see the complication, you're probably it.

because damn it Ed, that's not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it's why we stayed together.

Nobody knows why men do things.

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The more intelligent you become the more problems you'll have, Charlie.

But the deeper I get tangled up in this mass of dreams and memories the more I realize that emotional problems can't be solved as intellectual problems are.

People resent being shown that they don't approach the complexities of the problem - they don't know what exists beyond the surface ripples.

She was excited by the idea of having something dedicated to her, but I don't think she really liked it. Just goes to show that you can't have everything you want in one woman.One more argument for polygamy.

I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level.

It's amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together.

People resent being shown that they don't approach the complexities of the problem—they don't know what exists beyond the surface ripples.

What's right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn't help me solve a problem like this.

What's right? Ironic that all my intelligence doesn't help me solve a problem like this.

You can't have everything you want in one woman. One more argument for polygamy.

No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery.

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

Acting the moralist serves nothing. Each case is unique.

Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.

Love, she thought, he'd typed love just as she had. A multifacedted word, love , there probably wasn't another word in this or any other language that had so many shades and degrees. She knew that he loved her and she loved him, just as she loved Adam and Adam loved her. But with love, theirs or his, it was always a question of degree, and what one was willing to do to express that degree.

I'd be a liar if I said I had a normal family.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described – and will be, after our deaths – by each of the family members who believe they know us.