Complexity Quotes

“Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It's easy to understand why people do bad things. It's like "Yeah, okay, you're selfish and scared and cruel, I get it." Being good is complex and beautiful and hard.”
― Brennan Lee Mulligan

“She gave me breast and vaginal exams until I was seventeen years old. These 'exams' made my body stiff with discomfort. I felt violated, yet I had no voice, no ability to express that. I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.

When I was six years old, she pushed me into a career I didn't want. I'm grateful for the financial stability that career has provided me, but not much else. I was not equipped to handle the entertainment industry and all of its competitiveness, rejection, stakes, harsh realities, fame. I needed that time, those years, to develop as a child. To form my identity. To grow. I can never get those years back.

She taught me an eating disorder when I was eleven years old--an eating disorder that robbed me of my joy and any amount of free-spiritedness that I had.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Sometimes I look at her and I just hate her. And then I hate myself for feeling that. I'm worthless without her. She's everything to me. Then I swallow the feeling I wish I hadn't had, tell her 'I love you so much, Nonny Mommy,' and I move on, pretending that it never happened. I've pretended for my job for so long, and for my mom for so long, and now I'm starting to think I'm pretending for myself too.”
― Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

“Now many of us celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day
(instead of or along with Thanksgiving, Turkey Day,
Family Feud and/or Family Fun and Games).
I see it as a day to learn more about the people whose land we stole
(yes, even we whose forebearers came more recently,
because we continue to benefit from the theft),
and to sit in the complexity that is the building
and continuation of
our civilization.”
― Shellen Lubin

“We need to learn more.
We need to do better.
We are all woven together
in the fabric of the Earth
and over time
we will all thrive or fail
together.”
― Shellen Lubin

“For many years (even before the MMQs) when this day rolled around,
I discussed the complexities
of celebrating Thanksgiving 
as I did about Columbus Day
when the country that was founded by Columbus
(looking for someplace else)
and settled by Pilgrims
destroyed more than one peoples
and was on the backs of more than one other.

Times have changed.
It's been a relief to not have to fight so hard for that questioning anymore.”
― Shellen Lubin

“I'm gonna be really real with you. People are a fucking mess. We love to complicate simple shit, and simplify complicated shit. Sometimes, we get so caught up in trying to follow the rules that we forget to question whether or not the rules make sense. What works for Miles and Shante won't necessarily work for you, just like what works for Mom and Dad doesn't work for me. Remember what I said about being honest.”
― James Ramos, Daniel, Deconstructed

“Maybe at the end of our lives we get a Ferris-Wheel vantage of the whole tapestry, the quilt laid flat, answering for its complexity. At the beginning we’re handed frayed and stained flowery bed sheets, a scrap of polka-dots, a snatch of strawberry print. Tattered as they are, there’s some sustaining sweetness in there.

The oldest pioneer quilts conceal bits of paper batting between their threadbare layers: postcards, recipes, clipped snippets of newspaper poetry. Every spare material had a part to play, fragments of experience and feeling arranged in a repeating pattern, little sewn sound bytes spinning ordered fractals.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“No life is easy until one makes “easiness” a way of life.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.”
― Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

“A suffering intensifies our longing for a meaningful existence, the quest for a reason to live gains complexity. Suffering raises countless unanswered questions. Through compassion, we find our dignity isn't diminished by unanswered questions but enriched by their very existence...”
― Carson Anekeya

“Being complicated is enough to complicate your life.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“The true marvel of technology lies not in its complexity but in its ability to simplify the complex.”
― Aloo Denish Obiero

“It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
― Alan Perlis

“The significance of free speech extends beyond individual liberties; it serves as a guardian of truth and a catalyst for societal introspection. By allowing dissenting opinions to flourish, we invite the crucible of debate to forge a refined understanding of complex issues. This unfettered exchange of ideas challenges the status quo, prevents the entrenchment of dogma, and empowers societies to adapt and evolve in the face of ever-changing circumstances.”
― James William Steven Parker

“To make things even more challenging, cells must also be able to make all of their component molecular machines using only the resources that are available in the local environment. Think of the magnitude of this accomplishment. Many bacteria are able to build all of their own molecules from the a few simple raw materials like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ammonia. A single bacterial cell knows how to build several thousand types of proteins, including motors, girders, toxins, catalysts, and construction machinery. This cell also builds hundreds of RNA molecules with different orderings of nucleotides, as well as a diverse collection of lipids, sugar polymers, and a bewildering collection of exotic small molecules. All of these different molecules must be created from scratch, using only the molecules that the cell eats, drinks, and breathes.”
― David S. Goodsell, The Machinery of Life

“A metacrisis is a complex system whose elements are crises, and exhibits, as a unified whole, its own unique behaviors and properties beyond those found in its elemental crises.”
― Evan Tabak Atlas

“When someone dares to talk about complexity, challenge them to show the situation using networks. If they are not able, the problem has no solution.”
― Ronald Concer

“The solution of a problem lies within the problem itself. One must thoroughly understand and think on the nature of the problem in order to get ideas for solutions”
― Sheikh Muhammad Ibraheem

“Choosing a partner mainly for sex, without having much of a personal relationship, is like playing tiddly-winks instead of chess — because friendship is what provides any relationship with its complexity, substance, subtlety, sustainability and enjoyment.”
― George Hammond

“I’m setting myself up for a life of ease and enjoyment. Being human is complex enough in itself. I want to truly immerse myself in the beauties of life.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Cuanto más complejo sea lo que queremos aprehender, más importante es tener distintos pares de ojos, para que esos haces de luz converjan y podamos ver lo Uno a través de lo múltiple. Esa es la naturaleza de una verdadera visión: une los puntos de vista ya conocidos y muestra otros que se ignoraban hasta entonces, permitiendo que entendamos que todos son, de hecho, parte de lo mismo”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Chris’ response to Dick’s video, though she does not articulate it at the time, is complex. As an artist she finds Dick’s work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horsefaced junky: bad characters invite invention.) But Chris keeps these thoughts to herself. Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“There was no church, no philosophy, no school of thought, no nothing that could be trusted in full. To believe too much in anything was to sacrifice your faculties. The only way forward was to embrace the tussle of it all.

Born with a seething righteousness, Vern looked down on anyone les willing or able to put up a fight than she was.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Everything is complex for those who think, and no doubt thought itself takes delight in making things yet more complex.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Life is a ball of yarn that someone got all tangled. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight, or if it were unrolled and completely stretched out. But such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Among the sensations that inwardly torture us to the point of becoming pleasurable, the disquiet provoked by the world's mystery is one of the most common and complex.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet