Anthology Complex Quotes

For so long I have cursed this life, but in the end I can only come to accept it because I believe we all suffer from the anthology complex. We all compile these short stories that turn into fantasies. ~ M.B. Julien

You're at this place filled with a bunch of people who want to better their lives, but they need the help of others if they want even the smallest chance to succeed. At this place they tell you their stories, and then they tell you their dreams. You are sitting there, a tourist among people who you do not belong around, but these people, they intrigue you. They show you what it means to rise when you are down. They show you that even the bloodiest battles with your mind can in fact be won. ~ M.B. Julien

I run back to the peephole and see all three of them as they walk past with these things in their hands, I can hear the woman who I assume is their mother telling them a joke. I know the joke, but when I first heard it a long time ago, it didn't make me laugh. When she's done, I can hear the kids laughing. The joke still doesn't make me laugh, what makes me laugh are the laughing kids. That high pitched fast paced laugh that kids have. It's not until we get older that this laugh becomes low and drawn out. Trying to figure out when it's appropriate to laugh and when it's not. ~ M.B. Julien

I looked down at this city, this civilization, and I realized just how little I really knew about a world where there was so much to know. ~ M.B. Julien

A lot of my work is about equalizing things and kind of destroying any barrier between what's high and low, or what's deep or what's shallow, complex or simple. I hope I'm ever-changing. ~ Dan Colen

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know. ~ John Le Carre

I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on circumstances. ~ Mick Stevens

Republicans want to be tough and say, 'Illegals, you're gone.' But the answer is a lot more complex than that. ~ Susana Martinez

The human brain is by far the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos. ~ Owen Gingerich

Dark, subtle, complex, wicked - if only Hollywood movies were half as interesting as Hollywood accounting. ~ Stephen Metcalf

No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships. ~ Pope Francis

I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant. ~ Paul Cezanne

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn't work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer's real world and the writer's fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It's world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache. ~ David Mitchell

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. ~ Donella H. Meadows

Simple foods connect with your body's needs in complex ways. ~ Bryant McGill

Thus wuwei manifests itself in the adaptive integration of the interacting parts of units of a complex system. The tendency of wuwei is to lead a system toward a state of fractal congruence, a close fitting together, a coalescing, of its significant components. The cooperation of those components facilitates the functioning of the system on its new holistic level. At the highest levels of complexity, wuwei integrates human beings into the systems of the world. This process of integration represents a synergistic enhancement of Dao by empathic human participants in cooperation with nature and with the outgrowths of human nature that have emerged from our evolutionary history and constitute culture. Thus, a fractal self is such a human being who is a participant with others, open to various worlds within nature and culture, and this person becomes a potential facilitator of emergence. ~ David Jones

I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts - how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement. I'm particularly interested in this when teaching law students who often resist reading interdisciplinary materials or materials they interpret as too theoretical. ~ Dean Spade

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

"Envy" is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one's own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: ~ Ayn Rand

There's a certain pressure you put on yourself to use the comics page to full advantage that can focus your mind to a pinpoint, and when the juices are flowing, that's incredibly exciting. When you've managed to fit a complex set of actions or a complicated emotional passage into a single page there's the sense of satisfaction that I suspect a sculptor gets from chipping away at a piece of stone and ending up with a fully-realized work of art. ~ James Vance

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection. ~ Lewis Thomas

I learned to think about religion, race and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes. ~ Andrew Hudgins

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them? ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As someone who was gay bashed as a kid, I learned firsthand how a lot of people only feel good about themselves when they sense that someone or something is on a lower rung than they are. This inferiority complex drives racism and sexism as well as outdated attitudes about animals. ~ Dan Mathews

Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them. ~ William Faulkner

People who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world - and most recently in America - the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along. ~ Zadie Smith

A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war--killing people around the world, many of them women and children. ~ Liza Featherstone

Part of the brilliance of Stieg Larsson's books is that they are so complex, so many different facets coming together. ~ David Lagercrantz

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life. ~ Julianna Baggott

We know what the world wants from us. We know we must decide whether to stay small, quiet, and uncomplicated or allow ourselves to grow as big, loud, and complex as we were made to be. Every girl must decide whether to be true to herself or true to the world. Every girl must decide whether to settle for adoration or fight for love. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

Man of simple life envies the man of complex life and man of complex life envies the man of simple life! The solution is simple: Let them taste the lives they envy. And thus the envy will disappear; it will replace with the truth! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The genius is in making the complex simple. ~ Albert Einstein

The Icesave matter is complex and it is understandable that the issue has been oversimplified by many. Unfortunately some of the basic facts of the matter have been unilaterally interpreted, and sometimes distorted, giving rise to unjustified criticism of the conduct of the Icelandic authorities. ~ Johanna Siguroardottir

When you live in a condo complex with people next door, I don't know how you can be dead for four months without anybody noticing you not coming and going. ~ Laura Schlessinger

Boosting mankind's capability for coping with complex, urgent problems ~ Douglas Engelbart

The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he's a criminal instead of a scholar. It's business. ~ Henry Rollins

Alcohol was the reason we formed complex civilizations, and having to deal with the complexities of civilization is the reason most of us need alcohol. ~ David Wong

We live in one of the most complex ages for young, professional women. ~ Natalie Dormer

It's really hard to fit a complex idea into a 3-minute pop song. And when you're dealing with issues that you're passionate about, usually they have various levels. And within a poem, you can get around the issue of space, and in a song the same way, by simply leaving holes and alluding to what you're talking about. ~ Jon Foreman

In my personal recovery, mindfulness has helped me to become aware of my trauma responses and given me an anchor to stay present when I have been triggered. Being able to feel my triggers without reacting must be largely credited to learning to anchor myself in my body through mindful body scan meditation. ~ Christopher Dines

We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the "concerned reader of a novel," understanding each person's life as a "complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles. ~ Martha C. Nussbaum

The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I don't let people use me. That's why I like a small number of people in my life. The more people in my life, the more complex it becomes, so I just try to keep it at a minimum. ~ Anita Baker

So the paradox goes: No man who is really ignorant is ever aware that he is ignorant. That is its finest, most faulty manifestation; there can be no true ignorance without first some claim of intelligence or consciousness, or superiority or enlightenment. ~ Criss Jami

We are complex, and therefore, in our natural state, inconsistent, beings, and the opinion of this hour need not be the opinion of the next. ~ James Anthony Froude

There's no shortcut to an optimized whole and no complex system will ever really be optimal. ~ Jurgen Appelo

Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. ~ Parker J. Palmer

Canada is an Aboriginal country as well as a settler country. We rarely see ourselves that way, but it is past time that we started doing so. The fact that settlers are in a significant majority does not take away from the simple fact that when Europeans made first contact with the northern half of North America, there were millions of people already here. From the Beothuk in Newfoundland – a population completely wiped out by disease and violence – across every corner of Canada to the far west and north, Canada's first people had built a civilization, a way of life thousands of years old and rich in diversity. They were not "savages" (as they were called, in French and English), nor were they "ignorant wretches", nor were they less than people. They had developed complex societies with distinct languages, systems of governance; they were real people with a real way of life. ~ Bob Rae