Quotes About Ambiguity

The trees' bare bony fingers point crookedly towards Heaven or Hell or worse than that, towards nowhere.

Each time something contingent and impermanent is raised to the status of something necessary and permanent, a devil is created. Whether it be an ego, a nation-state, or a religious belief, the result is the same. The distortion severs such things from their embeddedness in the complexities, fluidities, and ambiguities of the world and make them appear as simple, fixed, and unambiguous entities with the power to condemn or save us.

Grounded in awareness of transiency, ambiguity, and contingency, such a person values lightness of touch, flexibility and adaptability, a sense of humor and adventure, appreciation of other viewpoints, a celebration of difference.

As much as I feel sad, I think that not knowing is what really bothers me.

My dad said I did the right thing. I hope I did, but it's hard to tell sometimes.

Maybe this is the way things are supposed to be but it doesn't feel right

I guess that's natural, but I'm not sure why.

A lot of it is good, but a lot of it is bad. Again, I don't know why this always happens.

What was it Pound had said in the Cantos? "I am not a demigod—I can't make it cohere.

This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is kind of an adverb.

The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this sense that it is mysterious. The not so good poem is often mysterious only by virtue of its concealment. Or it wears exotic clothing to hide its essential plainness.

Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

Matters of immense import may depend on such issues, but we can never do more than guess the outcomes of the roads we do not take.

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

You cannot predict the future.

Finally, he said, "Anything. He was capable of anything. The truth is, even though they had his name on a plaque on the wall at Langley, Frenchy sold me to the Russians in 1974, when I was in Kurdistan. There were unpleasant consequences. He had no conscience. He was a great man who was capable of great evil, not that uncommon a combination. Whatever you think he did, he probably did. And worse.

The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.

I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out - just forget it.

We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.

Doesn't look like a monster, does he?" "They rarely do.

And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing let's pretend

He found himself still with too many questions and not enough answers.

Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

A lawyer's answer...so close to the truth that the truth was able to hide in its shadow.