Quotes About Ambiguity

Don't lay any certain plans for the future it is like planting toads and expecting to raise toadstools.

Nobody knows and you can't find out

Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache.

My great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way, and rowing another.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.

That's why they pay me the big bucks.' 'What do you mean?' 'I don't know,' Dickson said, 'I heard it on TV.

Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.

They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.

He will say less than he means, and conceal more than he reveals.

Castin for years, and he still wasn't sure whether the lawyer deliberately selected garments that were incompatible with his build, or the cut of any clothing began to deteriorate immediately upon contact with him. It was, Parker surmised, one of life's great mysteries.

He was a locked box inside which tempests roiled. He was a man enshadowed by himself.

Billy grinned. 'Seems to me that you might be up to no good here. Are you a bad man?' Quayle smiled back, and the lights of the bar gleamed like dying stars in the void of his eyes. 'Trust me when I say that you have no conception.' Billy's smile faded.

Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty")

She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

tacenda Now what? She advanced the paper, and wrote: they mean no good to us She thought about this for a moment, and then directly under it, she added: they mean us no harm either.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't tell which.

People in tales don't know, always. But there they are.

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic.

There's no solution to life, there's going to be problems no matter what.

Life is about the gray areas. Things are seldom black and white, even when we wish they were and think they should be, and I like exploring this nuanced terrain.

Perhaps . . . our lot on the earth is to seek and to search. Now and again we find just enough to enable us to carry on. I now doubt that any of us will completely find and be found in this life.

His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.