Quotes About Complexity

She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.

Whoever had invented long division has a lot to answer for.

It is not an easy thing, she said, to love more than one is loved.

Felicità. Semplice come un bicchiere di cioccolata o tortuosa come il cuore. Amara. Dolce. Viva.

L'amore è l'unica costante in questo difficile mondo razionale, l'amore e la sua metà oscura, l'odio.

A história de toda a gente começa a meio da de outra pessoa, com meadas confusas de narrativa à espera de serem desenroladas. E de quem é esta história afinal?

Quem não sabe que ao pé de cada bandeira grande, pública, ostensiva, há muitas vezes várias outras bandeiras modestamente particulares, que se hasteiam e flutuam à sombra daquela, e não poucas vezes lhe sobrevivem? Mal

There was no twinkle in his eyes. Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough. Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn't understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn't work that way.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

The first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wond one day and heal the next.

Laws are black and white. The lives of women are a thousand shades of gray.

It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.

Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.

There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.

I don't think it's an invisible chromosome, or the inability to get pregnant, or anything else, that makes people so cruel to transgender folks. I think what they hate is difference. What they hate is that the world is complicated in ways they can't understand. People want the world to be simple.

My mother walks forward. She's crying, but there's a smile on her face. For God's sake, is it any wonder I can't ever understand what you people are feeling?

Asking me to describe my son is like asking me to hold the ocean in a paper cup

Maybe mothers - consciously or subconsciously - repelled their daughters in different ways.

You've seen those pictures of couples kissing in front of a Christmas tree, or clasping hands on their wedding day, or holding a newborn baby between them-a snapshot of joy. But what do you really know about them? Just that at the second the shutter clicked, they loved each other. You have no idea what trials came before, or after. You don't know if one of them cheated, if they grew apart, if a divorce loomed on the horizon. You simply see that in one static moment, they were happy.