Quotes About Complexity

Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?

It was possible that all men were difficult to read, but I had to live with Jock through every long

Who knows what anyone deserves? We like to play judge and jury, but we're all a rotten mess under our skins.

He's like a human bomb with dozens of trip wires. Some of them I can see, but most are deeply inside him.

It's freedom you want, then." "Good God, yes. Don't you?" "I don't know. I want to be happy I suppose." "Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.

How are you?" she asks. The world's most innocuous question, impossible to answer.

They were both beautiful and interesting, full of deep water, as the Kips would say. And

There wasn't anything simple about them, and I preferred that, and trusted it. My life wasn't simple either.

People interest me so much. They're such wonderful puzzles. Think of it. Half the time we've no idea what we're doing, but we live anyway.

Finnegans Wake, several

Love Contains Both "Yes" And "No

Both education and the investigation designed to support it must be "sympathetic" activities, in the etymological sense of the word. That is, they must consist of communication and of the common experience of a reality perceived in the complexity of its constant "becoming.

Reality is always too complicated - that's why it's ungraspable.

No soy peronista, pero a veces por dentro, con cara de póquer, uno grita Viva Perón.)

We want desperately to believe that every mother falls in love with her baby at first sight and that the complexity of relationships, so evident elsewhere as part of the human condition, is totally absent from the connection between mother and child.

How could he try to get Sandi to reveal her true colors when she was a rainbow?

Matt found that endearing. And disturbing in ways he didn't want to acknowledge.

Morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.

Marriages don't stay in neat, tidy shapes you know; they sprawl about, very messily sometimes. The important thing is not to let them get out of control.

Because of their composite nature, complex systems can exhibit catastrophic behavior.

Esta vida que vivimos no es más que confusión, no es más que una fecundidad ilimitada, y eso es demasiado. Es demasiado y no lo podemos entender. Porque no alcanzamos a ver más que nuestra pequeñez, nuestra insignificancia, y porque todo lo grande es demasiado grande.

Why are people so fucked up?" I asked "Maybe you do need college, Poiter," Everett said. "You want to know why people are so fucked up? Son, that's about the only question I can answer with even a small measure of authority. It's because they're people. People, my friend, are worse than anybody.

Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.

Not for the first time Spooner was reminded that marriage was not the straighforward assembly the instruction book led you to believe.