Quotes About Complexity

With this contradictory parentage of mine: solid English earth and French water goddess, one could expect anything from me. An enchantress or an ordinary girl. There are some who will say I am both.

man will always promise more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.

So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature—and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature.

A ficção como sempre, ocupa um lugar secundário face à História; as mulheres reais são sempre mais complexas e mais contraditórias do que as heroínas de um romance, tal como as mulheres reais dos nossos tempos, como as de então, são muitas vezes maiores do que o retrato que delas se faz, por vezes maiores do que o mundo quer que sejam.

A man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.

C'est compliqué, c'est le passé, pas important.

No matter how flat you make a pancake, it's still got two sides.

I love life, but not everything in it. I love people, but not all of them. I love myself, but not everything about me.

The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.

The farther and more deeply we penetrate into matter, by means of increasingly powerful methods, the more we are confounded by the interdependence of its parts.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

The clearest argument against Plato's authorship is probably that Plato never wrote a work whose interpretation was as simple and straightforward as that of Alcibiades.

if it be shown that absolute unity is also many and the absolute many again are one, then I shall be amazed.

A heart like an artichoke?" "Oui. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.

My grandmother told me you shouldn't try to define evil, that the minute you think you've got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don't think anyone knows what evil is. I don't think anyone has the right to say.

Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...

man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

Project Management Institute

Foreign films, Cliff thought, were more like novels. They didn't care if you liked the main character or not. And Cliff found that intriguing.

Now Thorndyke is going to enjoy himself. To him a perfectly unintelligible will is a thing of beauty and a joy forever; especially if associated with some kind of recondite knavery.

Piety was simple, and the World, woefully complex. What was virtuous, what was holy: these were verities that only the simple and the enslaved could know with certainty.

What we have is real love, but real love is messy and complicated. How can it not be, with our history?

People are people. Hateful and peaceful. Content and miserable. Honest and deceitful. With all of that inside fighting for control every minute of the day, it's a wonder everybody's not banging their heads against the wall.

Killing someone isn't like in the movies, something that you shrug off with a quip and a drink. It eats at you, even when the person you kill unquestionably has to die. And there's no way that her feelings about Melvin aren't, at the very deepest level, still complicated.