Quotes About Ambiguity

No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.

This is the difficulty with learning a language: not always knowing if words contain more than they say.

It was probably easier in the old days when the bad guys rode into town wearing black capes or whatever bad guys wore and the milk cows were ownded by honest people. Right off the bat, you'd know who you were dealing with. Now everybody dresses alike.

Highsmith's life and work would always give the appearance of a balancing act.

Sometimes you plant an acorn, and you plant it in good faith and instead of finding yourself with an admirable sturdy single oak tree, you're landed with a terrible mad forest that won't stop growing in all directions and develops an uncontrollable life of its own.

We've been in a relationship for five years now," Puck said, his voice hard. "It wasn't normal, it wasn't exclusive . . . Hell, I don't know what the fuck it was, but we both know that's the truth. Whatever's between us, it's been there since the first night we met.

It's not like we're a couple." "My dick was inside you three hours ago," he replied, eyes narrowing. "I don't know what that makes us, but it's fair to say we've moved past landlord and tenant.

There was a long moment between them that might have gone differently. Of all the times I saw the two of them together, this is the picture that is most stamped into my soul. It's the two of them, jumbled up and broken apart into confused pieces, and not really understanding, themselves, what they were doing.

She tried to decide whether the silence was an empty one or a waiting one.

he just seemed—not so much like a dad but like any person who didn't have things figured out. Maybe the world is a mystery to everyone, even the smartest people or the oldest people, even

May looked back at the girl again. It was her, May and it wasn't.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.

He'd done the right thing. Maybe. Or maybe there's no such thing.

I do not know what will be the end of it.

Monstrously giving birth to yourself, Admiring yourself and choking on yourself, Are you not, alas, the only tie Between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise? It seems to me that you are always on the boundary.

I cannot tell if the day; is ending, or the world, or if; the secret of secrets is inside me again.

She admonished him, saying 'I think I hate you,' which meant she didn't because 'I think I hate you' is the same as 'probably I hate you', which is the same as 'I don't know if I hate you', which is the same as 'I don't hate you, oh my God, my love, I love you, still love you, always, always have I loved you and never have I stopped loving you'.

Okay,' I said. 'So if I were to stop walking-while-reading, and hands in pockets, and little night torches, and instead looked right and left and right again for dangerous, unscrupulous forces, does that mean I'll end up happy?' 'It's not about being happy,' he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I've ever heard.

Unless you were dealing with the immensely stupid, which I wasn't, it was best to muss things up, to crease things, to leave tea stains, to place a small but partial muddy footprint, not exactly in the middle of the issue, but slightly to the side of, and hopefully suggestive of and incidental to the issue.

History in the making is a very uncertain thing.

He wanted her. He loved her. He had no idea where he stood with her. The thought of riding away tomorrow felt like someone scraped out his liver with a blunt knife. Lyle

What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.

The sight of the wall of water outside reassured me, giving me the idea that it made very little difference whether I stayed with her, or set out alone on my journey that had neither visible starting point nor destination. It didn't matter: since, however closely I became involved with another existence, my own world would always remain secret, inaccessible and shut-off; nobody would ever see me, except as a dim, changeable, wavering shadow, through its impenetrable, semi-opaque walls.

Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me. At times this could be disturbing.