Messiness Quotes

“You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.”
― Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“But Carrie had told her friend once, during high school, not to model herself on Julia. "I like your mom a lot," Carrie had said, "but anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She's trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you.”
― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

“Sometimes mess is more than just the easy choice - it's the optimal choice.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“Despite my flat still looking like a bomb thought about going off but got too depressed and just sat in the corner eating Pringles and crying, I was in an oddly good mood.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

“It shall be an offence for any man, either a husband or other person of the male sex, married or otherwise, being over the age of twelve years, to throw any item of clothing having been worn by the said person for whatever length of time, upon the floor of any bathroom or any room adjacent to and connected to a bathroom, without good cause.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

“Nothing in this world exists on principle. We know for a fact that the world is messy, that people believe in messy things. There aren't rules.

What does it do for your life to rip out the ground beneath your feet?”
― James Tynion IV, The Department of Truth, Vol. 4: The Ministry of Lies

“There are stories about perfection, but those stories are lies. No one ever made the world better by being perfect. There is only mess in humans, and sometimes that mess turns to magic, and sometimes that magic turns to kindness, to salvation, to survival.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers

“Whitman, you once told me, is democracy on the page, messy
and imperfect as we are in real life, which gave you hope

that we would one day make real life true democracy, ripe blossom,
pollen dusting every moment and person, each scampering mote of light.

This is why as you lay dying, I read “I Hear America Singing”
and knew you heard every word and could feel my hand on yours

though you were already moving toward other miracles than this life.
A sunflower followed your motion and a yellow dog stood guard.

You, who lived the notion that the sun belongs to each and every one,
beggars, dreamers, kings, all. You who believed banks could have hearts,

for god’s sake! You have left it to us, messy and imperfect
as we are and will be, to keep to the work side by side

and as long as it takes, all the while singing of miracles
just as Whitman and you taught us to do.”
― Rosemary Catacalos

“That was when I began to learn how to do all the things I had been taught not to do. I learned over the years to accept more and more of myself,. The doctor and theologian Gerald May said self-acceptance is freedom. I learned to waste a lot more time, which is the opposite of the fourth thing you're told after you're born: Don't waste time. (It comes right after Go clean your room.) The fifth rule is Don't waste paper, but in order to become who I was meant to be, I learned I had to waste more paper, to practice messes, false starts and blunders: these are necessary stops on the route of creativity and emotional growth. To make up for all my papery mistakes, I sent money to the Sierra Club. I had to accept that contrary to my parents' terror of looking bad, almost everybody worth his or her salt was a mess and had been an overly sensitive child. Almost everyone had at one time or another been exposed to the world as being flawed, and human. And that it was good, for the development of character and empathy, for the growth of the spirit. Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair by Anne Lamott

“there is space inside the human heart for infinite love and infinite sadness and all the messiness in between.”
― Rebecca Caprara, Worst-Case Collin

“Your job is to let me be a mess, keep me from deciding I'm not, urging me against getting my messiness over others.”
― Valentine Glass, Jarring Sex

“Our truest weaknesses will never be a selling point. It's those things that the people closest to us know about us that we'd rather forget - or perhaps that we don't even know about ourselves. It's those things we'd never share in a job interview and that people (we hope) won't mention in our eulogy.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep