Quotes About Complexity

She writes better than anyone else about the mother–daughter relationship, in all its thorny, fraught, inescapable complexity.

Sam. You and me are super fucked up right now, but your mom is family to me and you know that.

I don't want to love you," he said. "I know." "Half the time I hate you." "I know.

The ways she was different from any other woman in my life could not be counted. I didn't want to say she was sweet, because that seemed to negate all the ways she was fierce. I didn't want to say she was generous, because it would deny the ways she was selfish. I'd never had a woman in my life show me so much of herself.

But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.

Hating is easy. It's loving that's hard

But as I listened to my various mentors argue away the afternoon, I finally caught on to the basic point of it all. With chocolate, there are no straight answers. There are only strongly held opinions.

This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions - simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we too must be childishly simple in our questions - and maturely wise in our replies..

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.

There are as many sorts of women as there are women.

So much for their looks; but their characters - that is a much more difficult matter. We all have our quirks and no one is ever all bad. Then again, it is not possible for everyone to be all things all of the time: attractive, restrained, intelligent, tasteful and trustworthy. We are all different and it is often difficult to know on which aspect to dwell.

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think

Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.

Biological evolution is part of the winding-down process by which the informational gap between the potential and the actual tends to be reduced.

Entropy can be regarded as a measure of ignorance

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

A city is a concrete labyrinth in which our mind is lost.

Love in the 21st century is an immersion in greedy mathematics.