Quotes About Complexity

People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy.

he was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less.

Wonderful," the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.

Which had a top layer of truth to it, but latticed, like the caramel on the cronuts.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.

Love is many things, none of them logical.

Complexity emerging from underlying simplicity may be a natural law itself.

All of which goes to prove that there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

The aim of a PhD's to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you're doing after the first couple of years.

They are too stupid to fear. Vertigo is too complex for them.

Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish.

This first book's for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it.

It is a jungle where hierarchies of infinities tower like prehistoric beasts.

Oh, time," Dane said. "Time time time. Time's always a bit more fiddly than you reckon.

Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

The Tattoo. You wouldn't say "charming" -- that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo's brutal enticement.

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

Fortunately, in real life, we are not in danger of these bizarre extremes unless we consciously work our way into them. I can see no situation in which I will be presented with a Draconic choice between reading books and watching movies; or between English and Igbo. For me, no either/or; I insist on both. Which, you might say, makes my life rather difficult and even a little untidy. But I prefer it that way.