Quotes About Complexity

It always shocked me how you could understand so many things and be such a complete idiot about so many others.

I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue.

I always thought it would get easier to be a person as I aged. But it just gets more and more complicated.

Maybe this is what it feels like for civilians when they see cops doing some of the dirty work. A lot of times they don't understand what's happening. They see something they don't like and it upsets them—because they don't have the full story, aren't personally facing the problem, and don't know how much worse the alternative could be.

Kitai blinked slowly. Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous. We have a lot of words like that, Tavi said. They can mean more than one thing. That is stupid, Kitai said. It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing.

Bad things are inside everyone. I don't care how gentle or holy or sincere or dedicated you are. There are bad things in there. Lust. Greed. Violence. You don't need a wicked queen to make that happen. That's a part of everyone. Some more, some less, but it's always there.

I know. It makes my head hurt too.

It's a study in deliberate asymmetry.

What do we have left?" "Persons," I said quietly. "I don't understand," Susan said. "As a whole, people suck," I replied. "But a person can be extraordinary.

Harry?" she asked. "What was that?" "The plot," I said, "thickening.

It's an incredibly complex system of interweaving energy that influences good old Mother Earth around us, but it all boils down to a fairly simple concept: Shit happens.

It's in our nature to make a religion, so to speak, out of anything we don't understand, but it is simply advanced technology.

a heck of a lot of things are bound to go wrong in a world as big as this one. And if there's an answer to why it's that way - and there ain't always - why, it's probably not just one answer by itself, but thousands of answers.

Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself…there wouldn't be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

Eles se disseram, assim eles dois, coisas grandes em palavras pequenas, ti a mim, me a ti, e tanto. Contudo, e felizes, alguma outra coisa se agitava neles, confusa - assim rosa-amor-espinhos-saudade.

I love playing bitches. There's a lot of bitch in every woman - a lot in every man.

I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.

you can love more than one person." Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

Nous ne sommes pas des bêtes idéalisées. Nous sommes d'imparfaits mortels, conscients de cette mortalité alors même que nous la rejetons, trahis par notre propre complexité, ainsi faits que lorsque nous pleurons nos pertes, c'est aussi, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, nous-mêmes que nous pleurons. Tels que nous étions. Tels que nous ne sommes plus. Tels qu'un jour nous ne serons plus du tout.

O mal de origem com que o homem nasce. Nós não somos animais selvagens idealizados. Somos seres mortais imperfeitos, conscientes dessa mortalidade mesmo quando a negamos, traídos por nossa própria complexidade, tão incorporada que quando choramos a perda de seres amados também estamos chorando, para o bem ou para o mal, por nós mesmos. Pela perda daquilo que éramos. Do que não somos mais. Do que um dia não seremos de todo.

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.

What I saw that night was a world so rich and complex I was disorientated, a world complete unto itself, a world of smooth surfaces broken occasionally by a flash of eccentricity so deep that it numbed any attempt at interpretation.

I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable.

The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.