Alice Sebold Quotes

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

Humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

In politics there are so many holes, so many contradictions, you don't know what's happening.

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

I'm of the opinion that life doesn't always tie up neatly at the end of the episode.

I trust people to be human. Sometimes you do things that make amazing amounts of sense; sometimes you do things that don't make any sense whatsoever.

I think when you don't know where you stand with someone, they can surprise you in their goodness and their badness, and that makes them human.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

It is unwise to wish everything explained.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

There's a lot of ambiguity in life, and so often, our art is very neatly wrapped up at the end, when our lives never feel that way.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

It's a human phenomenon that there has to be a reason for everything. There almost never is.

People are unpredictable at the end of the day.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.