Etty Hillesum Quotes

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

The most interesting thing about being alive is that there is no black and white; there are many shades of gray.

Life is much more complex than the black-and-white sound bites that you get on television. There are nuances and shades of gray.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

The side of fairytales I don't like is that they always have happy endings, that there's just good and evil, and things are perfect. But life is a little more complicated, and that's what I try to teach my kids.

All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.

Life is infinitely complex, and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Life is too complex to compress into soundbites. Every situation is different.

Life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both.

My characters make incomprehensible decisions until you stand in their shoes. Then it makes more sense. Life is very rarely black and white, and most people are trying to do their best. I try not to judge.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

That's my favorite kind of television, where it's not wrapped up in a pretty little bow. It's like life. You deal with one thing in your life, 500 others rear their head.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

Ultimately, everyone's life is complex, and it's good to show that.

Just like we don't live in a two-dimensional world, we don't live two-dimensional lives.

Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.

We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.

Life is like a maze in which you try to avoid the exit.

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.