Quotes About Complexity

Though I lived with this man for my entire life, I never really knew him. He was like a frozen bay himself, I think—an icy crust, layers deep, above roiling water.

Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root.

I hate her for it. For seeing me clearly, for not seeing me at all.

Some children of borderlines secretly wish that their mother would die, not because they hate her, but because living with her seems impossible.

So come Cinderella, let me take you to the ball again. Perhaps you will see more than I did, or perhaps you will begin to understand how difficult it is to understand. Truth is never easily wrested from the stuff of life, and this stuff was even stranger and sometimes more repellent than the usual fare.

La vacuité d'un phénomène ou d'une chose, ce n'est pas son inexistence ni son absence, mais sa nature instable, mobile, subjective, complexe…

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

He ran Iran, which is a big and complicated country, wearing a pair of pyjamas.

Men are strange. It's almost unexpected to find they speak English.

They say one thing and another thing and both at once;

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

We are multiple beings having a dubious experience

Alwyn's beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she'd had, or how much water she'd drunk, or how many people she'd annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.

I am a jack-of-all-trades. I edit and teach and at times desire to be a clothing designer or an artist (one who doesn't draw or paint or sew) and I write everything but poetry and I am a mother and a social maniac and a misanthrope and a burgeoning self-help guru and a girl who wants to look pretty and a girl who wants to look sexy and a girl who wants to look girly and a woman in her middle forties who wishes not to look like anything at all, who wishes sometimes to vanish.

Non capivano che il segreto dell'orrore sta nel particolare. È molto facile, un gioco da bambini, pentirsi di gravi colpe: errori politici, adulterio, assassinio, antisemitismo. Ma chi perdona il particolare? Chi comprende i dettagli?

Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I'm afraid that most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word.

It was difficult to understand him. On the one hand he pandered even to the most unimportant things while on the other he was excessive and unfeeling. He might show the most fatherly concern for a female secretary who had stabbed her toe but be utterly ice-cold when issuing orders which set thousands to their deaths.

Whether we like it or not, Linge's Hitler comes across as a rounded human being, and he is arguably all the more terrifying for that. Linge

Randomness It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge. —MARQUIS DE LAPLACE A

I am large, I contain multitudes. —WALT WHITMAN

But does psychological sophistication override a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?

So we see the complex and contradictory motives that so often lay behind the apparently binary choices made by people in the wake of the rebellion. Indeed, this enforced reductiveness, the obligation to 'take sides', constitutes the coup's first, and most enduring, act of violence.

It's so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices.