Quotes About Complexity

I wish you and Dad had known him the way I did," she said wistfully. "He's such a contradiction. Rough and surly on the outside, but gentle and compassionate on the inside." "It sounds as though you're describing your father." She pondered her mother's words. "Nolan is a lot like Daddy. Principled and proud. Independent to a fault. I didn't realize that in the beginning, only later.

even if a perfect system could be designed, it would still have to operate in an imperfect world.

Tricky. The usual parenting approaches simply don't work for us. Every decision about our child involves just a little more consideration, stress, and anxiety than what other parents might experience. It's no cakewalk

The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others.

This is the meaning of philosophy, insofar as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves.

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

We can't always tell the whole story about ourselves.

She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.

It wasn't my life she was after, it was more. She wanted to eat my heart, and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

Mystery, I'd read somewhere, is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

Mystery, I'd read somewhere, is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

We're humans, so we're messy

You see the worst in the best of people," she said, shaking her head, "and the best in the worst of people.

thousands of years of study and experience have made it easier to heal the body, but no one has gotten much past square one on the human mind.

The only people who have no bad tendencies are dead—either literally or figuratively. To be fully alive, indeed to be fully human, is to have dark tendencies. These are among the aspects of our nature that make us most human and give us our character and passions.

There is no simple answer to such a question

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

Era ella como un bosque, como la oscura red de las ramas del roble, con un susurro inaudible de miles de yemas brotando. Y mientras tanto los pájaros del deseo dormían en la vasta maraña del laberinto de su cuerpo.

I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rotting bull. I dinna understand myself.

I always thought it would be a simple matter to lie wi' a woman, he said softly. And yet... I want to fall on my face at your feet and worship you-he dropped the towel and reached out, taking me by the shoulders-and still I want to force ye to your knees before me, and hold ye there wi' me hands tangled in your hair, and your mouth at my service...and I want both things at the same time, Sassenach.

It was a blur," people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation.

all, is it not? But

I do not understand men." That made him chuckle, deep in his chest. "Yes, ye do, Sassenach. Ye only wish ye didn

Frank loved me," I said slowly. "But there were … pieces of me, that he didn't know what to do with. Things about me that he didn't understand, or maybe that frightened him." I glanced at Jamie. "Not you.