Quotes About Complexity

One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales...

It's not possible to move from one activity to the next at blinding speed and be reflective at the same time. The more complex and demanding the work we do, the wider, deeper and longer the perspective we require to do it well. It's almost impossible to do that when we create no white space in our lives.

Of course it's almost ludicrously difficult to talk about art. And about beauty. Beauty is a perversion--how can you retain your self-respect when you talk about it?

None of us are this light and dark fantasy. What's dark to you may be light to me and vice versa.

Måske, siger han, er du selv indviklet, så bliver dit liv det også.

Vis ikke dette brev til andre, for intet menneske vil kunne forstå vores sindssyge forhold, før jeg tager mig sammen og giver kunstnerisk udtryk for det.

It's the unexpressed that interests me, he thought. I've been drawing too explicitly; it's a mistake to clarify everything.

Todo se complica más cuando se quiere ser propietario de las cosas

Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.

My point is, it's not cut and dried, black and white, good and bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you.

CHARLIE: So you can't even see Ivy's point? MATTIE FAE: No. CHARLIE: That Little Charles and Beverly share some kind of . . . complication. MATTIE FAE: Honey, you have to be smart to be complicated. CHARLIE: That's our boy. Are you saying our boy isn't smart? MATTIE FAE: Yes, that's what I'm saying.

Buddha teaches that there are many causes and many conditions and always refers to causes and conditions in the plural, never just as cause and effect. We are presented with a very complex picture of how things work.

Divorce confuses the church today because marriage confuses. And marriage confuses the church today because love confuses.

Even if he did explain it, no one would believe him because no one would understand him. That's the downside to being a genius - just because you understand something doesn't mean anyone else will.

Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.

I feel akin to the Platypus. An orphan in a family. A swimmer, a recluse. Part bird, part fish, part lizard.

Love isn't a decision. It's a feeling. If we could decide who we loved, it would be much simplier, but much less magical.

I treated that like a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, which is something most women are good at since life is a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle containing several trick two-sided pieces.

Honestly, everyone loves more than one person and people often lie about that. We're just not lying about it'…

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

It is not easy to speak of people and land in simple terms beginnings with a beginning and ending with an end.

We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.

Tick tick tick tick flip flip flip flip. Her brain never stopped. She was constantly running scenarios, tracing paths forward into different futures. Darkstalker had thought he was pretty good at this himself — he could see not just the most plausible future, but a few alternates where things were different. But she had thousands of strands gathered in her mind, weaving and interweaving and knotting and tangling. He regretted promising to stay out; it was fascinating in there.