Quotes about Complexity

All black women aren't sassy, loud, difficult, or subservient. We are, in fact, very complex and very diverse, living very complex and diverse lives. That point cannot be made enough.

A model should be as simple as it can be but no simpler

We want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

You must have carbon. Arsenic, boron, and silicon are the only other elements on which complex molecules can be based, but arsenic and boron are relatively rare and, where concentrated, poisonous to life, and silicon can hold together no more than about a hundred amino acids. Only carbon yields the chemical bonding stability and bonding complexity that life requires. Given the constraints of physics and chemistry, we now know that physical life must be carbon-based.

There is no subterfuge in you, Miss Adeline. Why is that?" Color came and went in her cheeks. "Everyone has layers. Even me." He leaned closer as his son neared and allowed a curl to wrap his finger. "I look forward to peeling back those layers.

Behind every great story there's always another story.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

The universe is a trillion, trillion threads moving in seemingly unrelated directions. Yet when you look at them together, they create a remarkable tapestry.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

deconstructing a person is easier than constructing one.

The only people who have no bad tendencies are dead—either literally or figuratively. To be fully alive, indeed to be fully human, is to have dark tendencies. These are among the aspects of our nature that make us most human and give us our character and passions.