Quotes About Ambiguity

Joseph Conrad

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. —JOSEPH CONRAD

Little by little, or maybe all at once, everything comes to mean its opposite; unreason argues itself into reason, and vice versa, and we cannot see the seams.

We have no ideas, and they're pretty firm.

Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything.

It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

There is no light. I don't feel like starting my generator. I used to get a big kick out saving people's lives. Now I wonder what the hell's the point, since they all have to die anyway.Dr. Stubbs Catch -22

Why are they going to disappear him?" "I don't know." "It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?

Oh, don't you worry about that," Yossarian comforted him with a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward.

Nobody is sure anymore who really runs the company (not even the people who are credited with running it), but the company does run.

A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th—this was Tetration's NY HQ. I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?

Everything was always something, but something—and here was the rub—could never be everything.

I became sensitive, or at least hypocritical.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!

so perhaps nothing was wrong.

Except Marianne, who smiled vaguely.

creature approached Robb

The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

There is a carpet, or a strip of something, that I am walking on...and it is being rolled up behind me. So that there is only the strip I am walking on, with nothing in front or behind me. Sometimes, I am so very tired - but there is no place to rest.

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city)

There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.

There's a fine line between criminality and genius