Steven Saylor Quotes

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not.

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration.

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.

I understand that we are actually complicated people but we are also dreadfully simple.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.

Imagination does not enable us to invent as many different contradictions as there are by nature in every heart.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

Because you aren't who you think you are. You aren't what everyone else believes. You might have delivered countless deaths but you love more fiercely than anyone I've ever known.

Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.

There's two heads to every coin.

... there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everyone is capable of everything.

There is the "you" that people see and then there is the "rest of you". Take some time and craft a picture of the "rest of you." This could be a drawing, in words, even a song. Just remember that the chances are good it will be full of paradox and contradictions.

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

People are weird. We do live on all levels at the same time and you can be fighting and flirting, and there can be fury and sexual tension. All that stuff can co-exist so it's just a testament to how complex we are. Or maybe it's a testament to how boringly we try and simplify everything.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.