Quotes About Complexity

Why try to slot fractured families into neat little boxes in this day and age?

Every marriage, every family, has its mysteries.

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We're each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We've got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

In every man there is a little of all men.

I knew, even at eight, that the confusion of values thrust upon me by parents, teachers, other children, nannies, camp counselors, and others would only worsen as I grew up. The years would add complications and steer me into more and more impenetrable tangles of rights and wrongs, desirables and undesirables. I had already seen enough to know that.

People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

I wasn't sure if the word boys should mean dim or incomprehensible. I was hovering between the two, with a healthy dose of testosterone-poisoned.

Fitzgerald said that the sign of genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. But what if you hold two contradictory fears? Are you still some kind of a genius?

All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can't solve.

She laughed. 'Was she wine or bread to you?' 'What do you mean?' 'It's from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.' 'Wine, I suppose.' 'Would it have turned to bread?' 'I don't know.' 'It doesn't always.' 'No, I suppose not.

It is difficult to imagine this kind of a new world because our present world is so different. On the whole, our life is too complex, our scholarship too serious, our philosophy too somber, and our thoughts too involved. This seriousness and this involved complexity of our thought and scholarship make the present world such an unhappy one today.

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.

I mean, if you have any idea of any kind of complexity or immensity or destiny, of general order, you're put in a position of nothingness. And I think this is true. I don't think I'm anything; I never have thought that. Whatever it is that activates it is a certain kind of energy that goes on. But the effect is ridiculous; it's absurd." --Lincoln Kirstein in "The New Yorker

No single group of people can be lumped together and neatly categorized.

that I realized while he can be judgmental, his words sometimes harsh, he is also kind and generous and fair.

Sometimes there is more to a person's need for white picket fences than safety, just as sometimes there is more to a person's rebellion than the need to lash out against rules.

Everything is always painted as black or white. Life is not like that, of course. Life is about all the shades of grey in between. I

What We Want What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

A camel is a racehorse designed by committee.

At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege

God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

As a species, the only way we're going to have a better world is by solving the harder problems.

Natural intelligence will always be one step ahead of artificial intelligence on a random walk.