Messy World Quotes & Sayings

Colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt, as Italians call it. When love strikes someone like lightning, so powerful and intense it can't be denied. It's beautiful and messy,
cracking a chest open and spilling their soul out for the world to see. It turns a person inside out, and there's no going back from it. Once the thunderbolt hits, your life is
irrevocably changed. — J.M. Darhower

Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well. — Atul Gawande

Last, I would like to thank the dogs, not just the Vick pack, but all of them, simply for being dogs, which is to say, tolerant and perseverant; willing to connect with a world that does not always return their affection; and for proving, time and again, that life, while messy, difficult, and imperfect, has the capacity to exceed our expectations and feed our undying hope. — Jim Gorant

Normally, Dominic appreciated his even temper, but today it grated on him. Maybe the forty or so hours without sleep were beginning to catch up with him. He fought an impulse to toss his phone over the metal railing. The world wasn't the orderly, rational place Jake liked to organize it into. It was messy. It was ugly. And, most recently, it lacked justice. "How is Boston?" The inane question almost sent Dominic over the edge. "How do you think? — Ruth Cardello

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place. — William Landay

The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing. — David Lynch

But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It's not the real thing. — Rachel Held Evans

You are not a mess. You are a feely person in a messy world. — Glennon Melton

The Church is both organism and organization - Woven together in a beautifully messy dance that stumbles across the stage of a fallen world. — Todd Stocker

We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe. — Fareed Zakaria

There are two types of understanding in this world. There's the kind that comes from the reading and the hearing, and it doesn't penetrate the skin. It is surface knowledge, like a soft blanket that can be placed over the shoulders. And then there's the understanding that comes from doing. That kind of understanding is not soft. It is water that soaks into the rocks and earth, and makes the seeds grow. It is messy, and painful, and impossible to hold. — Aliya Whiteley

I am such a romantic at heart. I don't think I will ever write a book that doesn't have at lease an underlying love story. There's just something about it that makes me feel alive when I write it. Romance is beautiful. It's sacred. It's messy. It's what keeps the world functioning (and falling apart). But no matter what, it's impossible for me not to write it. — Allison J. Kennedy

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business. Yet we have no other world to live in. And — Matt Haig

There is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond — J.K. Rowling

Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. — Jordan Ellenberg

Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It's built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don't even see. It's a messy business, bringing peace into the world. — Bono

My big thesis is that although the world looks messy and chaotic, if you translate it into the world of numbers and shapes, patterns emerge and you start to understand why things are the way they are. — Marcus Du Sautoy

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to ... my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. — Salman Rushdie

I'm forcing us both to confront the fact that one of our most beautiful dreams was a lie. We both believed in destiny as a kind of guarantee - a promise from the cosmos that we would have our time together in virtually every world we shared. But now I see that believing only in destiny means giving up responsibility. We fooled ourselves into thinking happiness was a gift we would be given time and time again. It's so much scarier to admit that our lives are in our own flawed, fallible hands. Our futures are not kept safe for us in the cradle of fate. We have to hack them out of stone, dig them out of mud, and build them one messy, imperfect day at a time. — Claudia Gray

A slut is someone, usually a woman, who's stepped outside of the very narrow lane that good girls are supposed to stay within. Sluts are loud. We're messy. We don't behave. In fact, the original definition of "slut" meant "untidy woman." But since we live in a world that relies on women to be tidy in all ways, to be quiet and obedient and agreeable and available (but never aggressive), those of us who color outside of the lines get called sluts. And that word is meant to keep us in line. — Jaclyn Friedman

230Our Internet debates ... tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite ... is always bad. — Evgeny Morozov

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember. — G.J. Paterson

And that's when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: "When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist." Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them. — Shane Claiborne

ALBUS:"Harry,there is never a perfect answer in this messy emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind,beyond the reach of magic. In every shinning moment of happiness is that drop of poison:the knowledge that pain will come again.be honest to those you love,show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe."
HARRY: "you said that to me once before.
ALBUS: "it is all I have to offer you tonight". He begins to walk away.
HARRY:"don't go!"
-Harry potter and he cursed child page 258 — J.K. Rowling

Your-no-our free will gives us choices and because we're not perfect, it's not always clear which choice is the right one ... So yes, we can be wrong. Yes the world's a messy place. But a world in which we always knew what was right and had no choice but to do it, that would be a world of puppets. — Emil Ostrovski

To me, what you want to do is find a way to let this play out between the virtual world and the physical world ... Ultimately, I think society will get there. It will be messy, but we'll get there. — Eric Schmidt

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can't live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we're distressed and go to therapy, our therapist's job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn't come with plots; it's messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can't have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense. — John Dufresne

To any survivor who may be doubting whether what they've experienced is truly abuse, remember that emotional, verbal, and psychological abuse will never be, and should never be, considered part of the messy equation of a normal relationship. As both metal health professionals and survivors can attest to, the traumatic highs and lows of being with a narcissist, a sociopath, or a psychopath are not the natural highs and lows of regular relationships. That suggestion is quite damaging to society and to survivors all around the world. — Shahida Arabi

The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind. — Arika Okrent

THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business. — Matt Haig

In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner. — Frank Bruni

Then, with a stately leap, the sun bounded into the sky, and the whole, messy, beautiful, broken world was stained with fire. — Kate Constable

At its heart, this book touches on a mystery of economics: what exactly is happening in our world, and why does it often work so well? As the authors show, apparently messy systems - such as untidy desks - actually exhibit a high degree of order: the piles of paper are close to hand, and the most important documents tend to make their way to the top while un-needed ones sink to the bottom. If the mess works, why mess with it? — Nicholas Blincoe

If we didn't have bodies, we couldn't feel the sun on our faces or smell the earthy, mushroom-y rich smell of the ground right after the rain. If we didn't have bodies, we couldn't wrap our arms around the people we love or taste a perfect tomato right at the height of summer. I'm so thankful to live in this physical, messy, blood-and-guts world. I don't want to live in a world that's all dry ideas and theorems. Food is one of the ways we acknowledge our humanity, our appetites, our need for nourishment. And so it may seem trivial or peripheral to some people, but to me, when I'm telling a story, the part about what we ate really does matter. — Shauna Niequist

He lived in a dreamer's world of ivory keys and messy shirts, unconcerned with the people around him. — Claire Legrand

Perfection shall remain the boring privilege of the gods, while our bungling, messy world every night shall be lived as if it were the last and every day as if it were the first. — Eduardo Galeano

I am human. I am messy. I'm not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I'm right. I am just trying - trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself. — Roxane Gay

It just seems to me that the world's kind of a mess, and the more messy it gets, the more interested I am in escapist fare. Having a good time is something that isn't about the war in Iraq or the Asian flu or the Kyoto protocol - things that are horribly depressing to consider in our real lives. I'm eager to get away from them. — Eric Stoltz

My eyes are a little blood shot from crying, and my hair's messy. But other than that i don't look like someone who's world is falling apart
-Courtney; Two way street
i love this quote. I'm not entirely sure why, but i just do. I guess probably the because it true.. once you're in that position. — Lauren Barnholdt

Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment. — Carrie Mae Weems

We would like to believe that when things are still and calm, that's the real stuff, and when things are messy, confused, and chaotic, we've done something wrong, or more usually someone else has done something to ruin our beautiful meditation. As someone once said about a loud, bossy woman, What is that woman doing in my sacred world? — Pema Chodron

It would be nice if life weren't so messy, but that's just not the nature of things; we want things to be perfect, but most of the time we just spend our existence cleaning up the messes we make - and sometimes the messes of other people, people about whom we care most in the world. — Craig Johnson

In a black and white world, Chase and I would never end up together - our mothers had ensured that - but in that small bathroom, under the harsh fluorescent lights, we dragged each other deeper into the gray - the messy, guilt-ridden space that sat between right and wrong. — R.S. Grey

Is Miami America? Is it a state? Is it the South? ... I love Miami for the same reason I love the places I love most around the world ... it's the mix here, this big, messy, dysfunctional hell broth of people from all over the world that make it so awesome and make it a place I want to keep coming back to. Also the food's good. — Anthony

I think what's happened, Marlee, is that you've realized the world isn't an addition problem. We tell kids that sometimes. We pretend the world is straightforward, simple, easy. You do this, you get that. You're a good person and try your best, and nothing bad will happen. But the truth is, the world is much more like an algebraic equation. With variables and changes, complicated and messy. Sometimes there's more than one answer, and sometimes there is none. Sometimes we don't even know how to solve the problem. But usually, if we take things step by step, we can figure things out. You just have to remember to factor the equation, break it down into smaller parts. — Kristin Levine

Food matters because it's one of the things that forces us to live in this world
this tactile, physical, messy, and beautiful world
no matter how hard we try to escape into our minds and our ideals. Food is a reminder of our humanity, our fragility, our createdness. — Shauna Niequist

What I wanted wasn't hidden, it was just messy. Uncertain. In my heart it could have been anything less prescribed, something open, different. Something that got me out into the larger world, watching people, the secrets playing on their faces. Something true. I wanted to see something true. Collect as many stories as my heart could hold.
My stupid heart. — Amy McNamara

Life isn't perfect and that's the kind of world where Jesus showed up. He wasn't born in a palace on a perfect day. He was born in the middle of the night during tax season to an unwed couple in a stable or a cave in a sheep field. That was God's way of showing us that nothing is perfect. Life is chaotic. It's messy. That's what Jesus was stepping into. — Louie Giglio

People were messy. They were defined not only by what they'd done, but by what they would have done, under different circumstances, molded as much by their regrets as their actions, choices they stood by and those they wished they could undo. Of course, there was no going back - time only moved forward - but people could change.

For worse.

And for better.

It wasn't easy. The world was complicated. Life was hard. And so often, living hurt.

So make it worth the pain. — Victoria Schwab

I'm not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, 'For the same reason I laugh so often--because I'm paying attention.' I tell them that we can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved. We must decide. — Glennon Doyle Melton

Finally, I'd like to thank my readers for staying with me all these years. I especially want to thank the ones who understand that the world isn't made up of happy endings, but messy, complicated, and untidy ones. — Lisa Lutz

...interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can't really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won't...Without experimenting, you can't figure out which interests will stick, and which won't. — Angela Duckworth

The theme of the Bible is not that the world's not messy but that God's at work in the mess. — Matt Chandler

It suddenly occurred to both Driggs and Lex, in that very same instant, that neither of them wanted anything more in the world than to tear off every single piece of each other's clothes and make wild, passionate, messy adolescent love under the radiant glow of the full moon.
Their chests rose and fell. A few seconds passed.
"I'm going to sleep," Driggs panted, clambering off the roof.
"Me too," Lex huffed, right behind him.
And without another word they fled to their rooms, slammed the doors, and threw themselves into bed, where they both spent the next five hours dazedly contemplating their respective ceilings. — Gina Damico

Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling class of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world's messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden - no less tiresome for being God-given - to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact. — Scott Anderson

[T]his impulse toward spiritual intimacy is found not only in the Abrahamic faiths, but in Buddhism, Hinduism, and native religions. Far too many people who understand God in these ways probably do not know how rich the tradition is that speaks of God with us, God in the stars and sunrise, God as the face of their neighbor, God in the act of justice, or God as the wonder of love. The language of divine nearness is the very heart of vibrant faith. Yet it has often been obscured by vertical theologies and elevator institutions, which, I suspect, are far easier to both explain and control. Drawing God within the circle of the world is a messy and sometimes dangerous business. — Diana Butler Bass

Art is about the messy and marvelous business of coming to your senses - and also, to the senses of the world. — Michael Leunig

Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe. HARRY — J.K. Rowling

If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty. — Norman Mailer

The world is noisy and messy. You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty. — Daphne Koller

Unlike art, the making of home does not stay done. Every morning, every evening, the mess awaits us. The messy, hungry, beautiful world, wanting and needing our touch. — Rebecca McClanahan

I stake the future on the few humble and hearty lovers who seek God passionately in the marvelous, messy world of redeemed and related realities that lie in front of our noses. — William McNamara

[Our family is] a wonderfully messy arrangement, in which relationships overlap, underlie, support, and oppose one another. It didn't always come together easily nor does it always stay together easily. It's known very good times and very bad ones. It has held together, often out of shared memories and hopes, sometimes out of the lure of my sisters' cooking, and sometimes out of sheer stubbornness. And like the world itself, our family is renewed by each baby. — Margaret Kennedy

The majority of the world - including myself - we all have problems and difficulty in life, and life's messy. But there are great rewards in life, too. — Eric Close

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean. — Kurt Vonnegut

Regardless of how well a woman could fight or shoot; regardless of how high the lift-kit on her pickup truck; regardless of the number of degrees she had conferred upon her; regardless of how much money she made; regardless of how messy her past was; regardless of how capable she was of taking care of herself and the world, women were gifts from God and were to be treated as such. Full stop. — Anonymous