Quotes About Ambiguity

In the dim light her eyes looked more gray than blue. I liked the way the lighting softened her features, the way it rendered her eyes, even her smile, alluringly ambiguous.

I looked at her. Why was it her question seemed suffused with double entendre? She was attractive, of course, more than attractive, but that wasn't all of it. She had a way of looking at me with a sort of confident sexual appreciation, that was it. As though she was seeing me just the way I might hope a desirable woman would see me. And she made it seem so natural, so real. I would have to be careful.

the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever

The young man visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.

The discrepancy between logic and memory suggests that we don't always know what we want.

The problem with material remains is that they are silent: they don't provide their own interpretations. And that means various interpretations are possible.

I don't think anybody can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get up to ninety-eight.

The more you find, the wronger it gets.

But most of all they only say you were caught, that you wanted to be King, that it must be so.

Or maybe it wasn't a man at all.

McKinley was known above all for his inscrutability. He gave almost all the people he met the impression that he agreed with them, and rarely allowed even his closest advisers to know what he was thinking.

Since you have no choice but to begin in uncertainty, you must learn to tolerate uncertainty and, if possible, to turn it into excitement.

Whether Stalin, out in Siberia, met with actual peasants, let alone large throngs of them, as did Stolypin, remains unclear.

When everything looks perfectly right about a person, there's usually something significantly wrong. They were probably in their early thirties, that awkward age when people still believe they matter and that life is going to go their way.

These principles empower the Constitution with a timeless strength, even in the midst of social ambiguity and change. "Our peculiar security," said Thomas Jefferson, "is in the possession of a written Constitution.

He had no idea where he was headed, but he knew he had to go. On each breath that panted through his locked teeth, he whispered hate as if it were a question.

Prediction," as Niels Bohr liked to say, "is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

Unless you have more information, however, it's hard to say what's causing what.

The future is far less knowable than you think.

MODERATOR: Tonight, our guest: Thomas Sargent, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the most-cited economists in the world. Professor Sargent, can you tell me what CD rates will be in two years? SARGENT: No.

A sustained scenario practice can make leaders comfortable with the ambiguity of an open future," Wack writes. "It can counter hubris, expose assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit, contribute to shared and systemic sense-making, and foster quick adaptation in times of crisis.

As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out.