Quotes About Complexity

He had never refused to confront any of his wife's facets, however hurtful or confusing he found them.

It was a kind of Cadmean victory.

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don't expect from them.

Monstrous tenderness gets tangled in guilt differently from intentional cruelty. More deeply. And for longer.

Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don't have to sew buttons.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.

Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.

He, Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch." 516

Beneath every history, another history.

Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything. Though

So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

Every marriage is a mystery to me, even the one I'm in. So I'm no expert on it.

I thought how difficult it was, how impossible all marriages really are, each person coming to battle with separate and complicated histories. It made a case for incest.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

If you understood everything in the mind of an author then reading his books would be no fun at all.

We want everything, we want to be everything. We want to experience all the joys of good fortune and the full depths of suffering. We want the excitement of action and the calm of observation. We want the silence of the desert as well as the noise of the forum. Simultaneously we want to be the hermit´s thought and the voice of the people; we want to be both melody and harmony. Simultaneously! How could this be possible?

I love my parents' murderer; I suppose I could love anyone.

I like all the things that make you monstrous.

I don't know," Call said. He was starting to worry that there weren't any good guys. Just people with longer or shorter Evil Overlord lists.