Quotes About Ambiguity

I don't know, even now, if that was honesty or a guilt trip. Or maybe sometimes a thing can be both.

A silent observer in the early morning could mean many things, for a prisoner, and none likely to her benefit.

She smiled, and I couldn't tell if she was fairly to take my meaning or failing to take my meaning on purpose, or just didn't consider it the insult I had intended it to be. Actually she looked like she was taking it as a compliment, and I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

And if we Severinos are all the same in life, we die the same death, the same Severino death. The death of those who die of old age before thirty, of an ambuscade before twenty, of hunger a little daily.

"Fun"—it always seemed to leave you at a loss.

Did Anna also, sometimes not know what to do next? Because she knew what to do next, because she knew what to laugh at, what to say, did it always follow that she knew where to turn? Inside everyone, is there an anxious person who stands to hesitate in an empty room?

They had sat round a painted, not a burning, fire, at which you tried in vain to warm your hands.....

My trouble has always been," Mrs. Channing said, "that I can see both sides of every question." "Trouble? That is a gift, Madame; a very unusual gift." Mrs. Channing rose and prepared to follow her into lunch. "I don't think it's a gift," she said. "If it is, it came from a very wicked fairy.

For one thing, she hadn't exactly chosen a field; although she has since childhood imagined picking up her Oscar, the category has never been determined. There was some thought that by the time she grew up they would give out Oscars for Best Novel (and that by then she would have written one), or that maybe she would just get some kind of honorary Oscar for her distinctive life observations made in everyday conversations, or the occasional letter.

[N]ot quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing

I think in a lot of romantic comedies it ends with a kiss, and I feel like in modern day relationships, and maybe just my own experience, it starts with a kiss and then all sort of falls apart and then comes together. You're texting. You're wondering what's going on. There's no definitions, there's no labels.

Adulthood isn't black and white - it's a thousand shades of grey. Or taupe. It's not who you are, it's where you are.

You can plan all you want, but you will never know what will be. Life just is, and I am here in it. I am waiting for what comes next.

To the Romans, Egypt was exciting: incomprehensible, with a pleasing hint of malignity.

So much of life seems speculation.

Stupid — this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right.

Let's not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man's-land, halfway between dreams and reality.

If the nation's economists were laid end to end, they would point in all directions.

The nineteenth century faced an ambiguous legacy. On one side was civil society theory, teaching that human society makes men better. On the other stood Rousseau, proclaiming that it makes them worse.

Ik vraag me af waar meer durf voor nodig is, doorleven met een lot dat je kent of aanmodderen zonder enig idee van wat je staat te gebeuren

I am hidden and I am not.