Quotes about complicity

page 2

“This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.”

“Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.”

“the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.”

“Simon’s love life was complicated, but there was a pang, just for a moment, for this woman talking graphic novels with him.
Ah, well. Tessa Gray, foxy nerd, was probably dating someone already.”

“To see truth as truth, we don't need a lot of study. It's not complicated. What we need is pure observation. An open mind and fresh eyes will serve us well.”

“But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”

“The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.”

“Men aren't stupid, and you don't need a complicated set of rules to find a good one who loves you. Here's the only rule you need: if a man loves you, he will do anything he can to keep you around. Anything.”

“seven wonders of the world
and I have to ask for an eighth
fill a bottle with some prayers
and spend them on hope
create an easy route
just so I can complicate
send my heart down that
slippery slope”

“That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.”

“That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness…”

“I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”

“Man, life was complicated. But the truth was simple. He was her home. He was where she belonged.”

“Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.”

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”
“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”

“There weren't any villains though. The world was just complicated in various ways, and there weren't any obvious villains to be found. It was excruciating.”

“Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.”

“Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.”

“… love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon--it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.”

“I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.”

“I’m full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.”

“You cannot write for children… They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.”

“Start here & go until you die, he said. What's so complicated about that?”

“She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?”

“Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”

“Simple and complicated, as most true things are.”

“Why is life so complicated….?' I asked.
'To keep us from being bored,' he said.”

“Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.”

“For me hotness was a complicated matter involving brains, humor, and some other things, but all that aside, I was willing to admit Sean Evans was nice to look at.”

“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”

“The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.”

“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.”

“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”

“It's nothing that complicated, I just want to kill him”

“You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.”

“I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.”

“Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast”

“Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.”

“All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.”

“You're my favorite complication.”

“And love is always complicated. But still humans most try to love each other, darling. We must get out hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”

“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

“There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.”

“In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.”

“The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.”

“It's a coffee cup."
She could hear the irritation in her own voice. "I know it's a coffee cup."
"I can't wait till you draw something really complicated, like the Brooklyn Bridge or a lobster. You'll probably send me a singing telegram.”

“Beneath all of her thoughts and worries, beneath the complication of conflicting identities and needs, maybe it's as simple as loving the way some other person looks when they're sleeping.”

“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”

“Life is still life. It’s still tough, complicated, and more than a little messy, with lessons to be learned, mistakes to be made, triumphs and disappointments to be had, and not every day is meant to be a party.”

“Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries.”

“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable… The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”

“Nothing worthwhile is ever without complications.”

“it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.”

“Walk really, really carefully. It's not complicated, but if you mess up, you'll die, so pay attention.”

“If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.”

“Love is the easiest thing there is. It's the layers of doubt, fear, and expectation that make it complicated.”

“The heart wants what it wants, Dolp. You don't plan on making your life complicated, it just happens, and you don"t do it on purpose, and you don't do it to hurt people who love you. It just turns out that way sometimes.”

“It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.”

“Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”

“Want me to warm up the sauce?”
“Do we do that? I mean, it’s in a jar, right? Can’t you just dump it over the pasta?”
“Well, you can, but it tastes better if you warm it up.”
“Oh.” Eve sighed. “This is complicated. No wonder I never cook.”

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated.”

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

“The success of any trap lies in its fundamental simplicity. The reverse trap by the nature of its single complication must be swift and simpler still.”

“Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.”

“The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.”

“I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.”

“… that's not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it's why we stayed together”

“Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent”

“NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.”

“Maybe by the time they were in their Silver Year, Master Rufus would communicate complicated theories of magic by the lifting of a single bushy eyebrow.”

“I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.”
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”

“After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.”

“I'm not that complicated, Haven. The truth is, I've wanted you ever since I met you in that damned wine cellar. Because I got a bigger charge out of that five minutes than I have with any woman before or since…”

“I'm an oddity of one, my strangeness too complicated to explain or share.”

“Our relationship is complicated by the fact that I am emotionally retarded.”

“Calvin: As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.
p25”

“He loved her. It was as simple and as complicated as that.”

“It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it.”

“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

“It is always so simple, and so complicating, to accept an apology.”

“The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”

“At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.”

“The final product is a man-plant-animal symbiote that is admirably adapted for survival on this disaster world. No emotions to cause complications or desires that might interfere with pure survival. Complete ruthlessness—mankind has always been strong on this anyway, so it didn’t take much of a push.”

“These problems never seemed to baffle my grandfather nor cause him any anxiety; difficulties which in most people's eyes would have led to endless complications were disposed of by my grandfather almost without thinking, with the easy assurance of a sleepwalker who strolls along a ledge halfway down a hundred-foot precipice—yes, I am tempted to say with the same disregard for the laws of nature as a ghost passing through locked doors.”

“Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.”

“Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
…
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.”

“… To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. …”

“You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. …The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.”

“[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.”

“Without getting complicated let me recapitulate my art training in the following way: the Academy first, the break with the Academy when I hit the Hofmann School which is Cubist. The next real break follows when I see Pollock’s work [1940-41] and once more another transition occurs... It was a force [Pollock’s work], a living force, the same sort of thing I responded to in Matisse, in Picasso, in Mondrian. Once more, I was hit that hard with what I saw… I began feeling the need to break with what I was doing and to approach something else.”

“The way out from complication and doubt is to reduce the good to pleasure, something close to the body, or to utility, something useful to the body. … The body is considered as a factor all human beings have in common, hence an easy basis for generalization.”

“In one experience I remember vividly, there was a rich range of shades. It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p. m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others - the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

“The nature of the mind is to interpret non-essentials essential. The mind creates artificial needs, believing it cannot live without them. In this way we carry a great burden of attachments throughout our life. Attachment is itself a great burden on our minds. We may never understand the extent of the burden till we’re free of it. But if we find joy within, we can live a simple life, free of endless complications.”

“The concepts 'system', 'apparatus', 'environment', immediately imply an artificial division of the world, and an intention to neglect, or take only schematic account of, the interaction across the split. The notions of 'microscopic' and 'macroscopic' defy precise definition. So also do the notions of 'reversible' and 'irreversible'. Einstein said that it is theory which decides what is 'observable'. I think he was right - 'observation' is a complicated and theory-laden business. Then that notion should not appear in the formulation of fundamental theory. Information? Whose information? Information about what? On this list of bad words from good books, the worst of all is 'measurement.”

“To history, until yesterday, Halifax was the arch-appeaser. This, it is now recognised, was a mistake. His rôle, however, was complicated. In these pages he is not the man who stopped the rot, but the embodiment of Conservative wisdom who decided that Hitler must be obstructed because Labour could not otherwise be resisted.”

“But besides relatedness and influence I should like to see that my colors remain, as much as possible, a 'face' –their own 'face', as it was achieved – uniquely — and I believe consciously - in Pompeian wall-paintings - by admitting coexistence of such polarities as being dependent and independent — being dividual and individual.
Often, with paintings, more attention is drawn to the outer, physical, structure of the color means than to the inner, functional, structure of the color action... Here now follow a few details of the technical manipulation of the colorants which in my painting usually are oil paints and only rarely casein paints.
On a ground of the whitest white available – half or less absorbent – and built up in layers – on the rough side of panels of untempered Masonite – paint is applied with a palette knife directly from the tube to the panel and as thin and even as possible in one primary coat. Consequently there is no under or over painting or modeling or glazing and no added texture – so-called... As a result this kind of painting presents an inlay (intarsia) of primary thin paints films – not layered, laminated, nor mixed wet, half or more dry, paint skins.
Such homogeneous thin and primary films will dry, that is, oxidize, of course, evenly – and so without physical and/or chemical complication – to a healthy, durable paint surface of increasing luminosity.”

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”