It's a mess. But you know what? It's a beautiful mess that we can't and shouldn't try to avoid.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.

Living is messy.

By the living jingo, she was all of a muck of sweat.

She was still in love and didn’t know what to do with all this love of hers. There was so much of it, and it was so messy: leaking, spilling, tumbling out of her, like stuffing falling out of an old rag doll that was coming apart at the seams.

When a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The behavior of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken separately.

Girl, it's time we met and made a mess.

It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?

If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.

A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you'll learn that soon enough...and the parts that look like magic turn out to be the messiest of all.

What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic. [p. 100]

It's all a part of this world where we're all kind of mixing a lot, and… in that way we're all a bit confused about who we are, where we belong, where's home, and … who is important to us…

Africa is a mess. It is a mess by any civilized measure of human progress. It is a mess by most uncivilized measures of human progress.

Everyone messes up. How you deal with it is what determines who you are.