Quotes About Ambiguity

Why does anybody do anything? Mimi asked impatiently. Most of the time we don't know--any of us.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle wiht the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expacted or hoped to see than on what was really there.

didn't know whether or not she

With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.

Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

Art thou not he? Art thou Montezuma?

Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.

But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty

The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests

Success comes not from having certainty, but being able to live with uncertainty.

Weak leadership will always hide behind ambiguity and rhetoric.

If people knew what they had to do to be successful most people wouldn't.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

Cuando crezcas te darás cuenta de que casi todo lo que se oye por la noche puede interpretarse de diversas formas. Y de hecho, no sólo por la noche y no sólo lo que se oye: también lo que se ve, e incluso lo que se ve a plena luz del día, puede casi siempre entenderse de muchas formas.

Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?

I think it was that love that I loved. That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extend to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first.

It means we're looking one way, while following another. We're for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated as soon as I passed over it.

I thought about things, the pros and cons. But in the end I would be so confused, because I never believed there was ever any one right answer, yet there were many wrong ones.

Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?

When you are told, It was meant to be, ask, Who meant it? What does it really mean? Is someone trying to make you accept an undesirable situation or one in which you have doubts? When you are told, Shit happens, remember that plenty of other things happen as well, such as generosity, forgiveness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. When you are told, It's simply fate, ask yourself, What is simple about it? What are the alternatives of fate? What is fate's opposite?