Quotes About Complexity

Behavior of a system whose parts display a choice cannot be explained by mechanical or biological models.

Not everything can be understood or resolved," said Henry. "But it all has to be faced, I think.

Aunt Flo's love is not a soft thing, I think, but something hard and unyielding, which can be good or bad.

A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin.

There's something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

The little Prelude in C Major that starts the set is one of Bach's most famous and beloved pieces (it was reportedly a favorite of his, too), yet what appears to be a simple rippling up and down on chords disguises a complex interweaving of melodies.

De mensen zijn zo consequent als een toverbal en zo voorspelbaar als een tsunami en soms deugen ze opeens.

Diepzinnigheid die niet gebakerd ligt in paradoxale oppervlakkigheid is natuurlijk een gruwel.

I feel a certain kinship with them. They don't compromise and they're not easy to know." -Owen d'Arcy

and for Stephen, who carried all his theories in his head, fine detail was a hindrance to clarity of thought.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave.

He wanted his daughter's happiness more than anything but he saw that she was not destined primarily for happiness. She was too complicated for happiness.

Oh Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!

However, not even science could account for all the variables that people introduced to the equation.

Blood may be thicker than water, but it is still sticky, unpleasant, and generally nauseating.

In no order of things is adolescence the time of simple life.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

At first her prose may seem a luxuriant unpruned Eden. But soon the reader sees the careful gardening, the astute nurture of what nature provides. Frame's inner geography is complex, her psyche contains elaborate structures. She had the artist's ability to make strange associations and imaginative leaps;

Things that are easily done are often much harder to undo. Sometimes, impossible.

a good marriage is like a good lasagna: only those involved actually know what goes into it.

Perhaps no word exists in our terribly inadequate English language to name this abstract, emotional thing that is not forgiveness, is not forgetting, and also is both.

His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.