Underlying Complexity Quotes

As a surfer, I think of places like a wave: you see one thing on the surface. But you always know there's something different going on underneath.

We're really just the frosting on a cake and we don't know what's inside the cake.

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.

What I'm doing on stage now is just the tip of the iceberg.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

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.

I think people will become more and more aware that we are all more than we seem.

I immediately suspected there was much more to it than was being said.

The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.

It's really complex to make something simple.

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.

I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.

Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing.

Some men are one thing on the surface and another underneath. The true poet shows not just the exterior of his subject, but all the contradictions within, and lets the reader draw his own conclusions.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

Sometimes the things I do look effortless, but it's not like that. It's very difficult, but because of my style, I make it look easy.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

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

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.