Quotes About Ambiguity

What Is Art?150 I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm exceedingly vulgar — and the funny thing about it is — I don't understand — I get the shapes in my head — can never make them exactly like I want to — but there is a fascination about trying — And then too — there is the delicious probability that I don't know anything about what Art is — So it's fun to make the stuff —

You get mixed messages because I have mixed feelings.

Is there a word for the moment you win tug-of-war? When the weight gives, and all that extra rope comes hurtling towards you, how even though you've won, you still end up with muddy knees and burns on your hands? Is there a word for that? I wish there was.

Most things a person does," she said to the dark liquid of the goblet, "they do for several complicated reasons. I'm rarely certain that my motives are pure.

My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else's dream.

I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying. Then again, what if trying, even in the face of certain failure, feels as good as accomplishing? What if it's even better? And here we are again.

I'm faced at every moment with two possible lives, and I must choose one without knowing whether I want it, whether it's worth it.

It's impossible to fail if one doesn't know how the end should look. And it's impossible to succeed. But it's possible to enjoy.

I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying.

I wish I could ask the future whether I should give up or keep trying. Then again, what if trying, even in the face of certain failure, feels as good as accomplishing? What if it's even better? And here we are again.

He gave me a look, indecipherable as all Mildmay's looks were.

There is a terrible weight to that never from Malkar Gennadion, who is also Brinvillier Strych-and who knows how many other names he may have had? Who knows how many lives he may have held and used and discarded, how many other lives he may have left ruined in his wake? I wonder if even Malkar himself knows any longer.

clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl

What did she want? Frances couldn't tell. She wasn't sure she cared any more. There had been too much dancing back and forth. The night had been over-stretched: it had lost its tension.

Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility.

When she spoke at last, I knew at once that she was rather drunk. "Seen something you fancy, Nancy?..." she said. I swallowed, unsure of what reply to make to her. She walked closer, then stopped a few paces from me, and continued to fix me with the same even, arrogant gaze.

I'm not so sure about him.

seen something in their poses, for, 'Spoony!

Along with taxes and death, the only certainty in life is that we just don't know. So we might as well join this inevitability.

Maybe you'll be pleased, or relieved, or — how dreadful that I don't know what you'll be. That's the problem, right there in a nutshell.

What the hell was an acquisitions consultant? An arms dealer? A white slave trader?

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. "It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen." But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.

Stacy wasn't certain; she'd never bothered to pay attention to details like that, and was always regretting it, the half knowing, which felt worse than not knowing at all, the constant sense that she had things partly right, but not right enough to make a difference.

Ambiguity makes everyone tolerant of incompetence.