Marjane Satrapi Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

I like to play the grey areas in life - that's the most uncomfortable place to be. Nobody likes to be in that in-between state where there don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot of tension in that, and a lot of stuff to play with - where it's uncomfortable and awkward and sad and scary.

The truth is complicated, and few people are actually monsters.

We must resist the pressures of others to soundbite our complicated, nuanced experiences.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

My worry is that the world is becoming more chaotic every day. My excitement is that more people paying attention to 'Less but better' could help solve our growing problems.

I do not look at the world in terms of black and white - and I find people who do rather scary. I think it's all shades of grey.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

I guess in my own life, privacy, anonymity, and the mystery of being lost are important. I also feel that people are mysterious and complex no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try to reveal their own mystery.

Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.

People are terrified to be set free - they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security... How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?

I try to look at life carefully and reproduce life the way life is. It's a question of looking carefully at how it is. In life, you don't have total happiness. People always say that. But you don't have total sadness either, no matter what situation you are living in.

I was raised by and have raised people who regard telling one story when two would do as a sign someone is not really trying.

The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

Creativity asks you to enter realms with uncertain outcomes. People want to create a safe life for themselves so they try to live without fear and they end up killing their creativity in the process.

The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don't, nothing will work out the way they want.

I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.

There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.