Quotes About Ambiguity

The momentary confusion experienced by everyone in the vicinity when a cell phone rings and no one is sure if it is his/hers or not: conphonesion, phonundrum, ringchronicity, ringxiety, fauxcellarm, pandephonium.

Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on. But this strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines, and the statement gave no indication that we might have good reasons to prefer understanding and know-how to ignorance and superstition

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.

Many hours of law-school argumentation have been spent on what to do with a man who stabs a corpse thinking it is his sleeping enemy, or whether it makes sense to charge a shooter with attempted murder if the nearest hospital is five minutes away and his victim survives, but to charge him with murder if the nearest hospital is fifteen minutes away and the victim succumbs.

If people are mentally agile enough to interpret events in many ways, what's to prevent a child from interpreting the meaning of to nail as "to obscure a surface by nailing things to it," or to coil as "to cause a long object to have a filament coiled around it"?

Polysemy refers to a word's having a number of distinct but related senses, and is different from two other ways in which a sound can have multiple meanings.

When the term ham sandwich can refer to a man sitting at a lunch counter, there seems to be little hope for the logician's dream that the expressions in a language can be mapped onto states of the world according to a fixed set of pointers.

. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

I really love it when you get that strange combination of feelings that play against each other.

I've got the long hair and kind of androgynous look. It's love-hate; it's sexy, but not sexy. So it's either you get it or you don't.

Often you don't know whether a woman is friend, enemy or lover until it is too late. Sometimes, she is all three.

You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.

It is good to love the unknown.

the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don't know anything about them at all.

What do we see when we don't know what we're looking at?

Why refuse to specify? Because while you are failing to define success (and thereby rendering it impossible) you are also refusing to define failure, to yourself, so that if and when you fail you won't notice, and it won't hurt.

brilliantly & terribly

What you hear in the forest but cannot see might be a tiger. It might even be a conspiracy of tigers, each hungrier and more vicious than the other, led by a crocodile. But it might not be, too. If you turn and look, perhaps you'll see that it's just a squirrel.

Chaos is where we are when we don't know where we are, and what we are doing when we don't know what we are doing.

Artists must be contending with something they do not understand, or they are not artists. Instead, they are posers, or romantics (often romantic failures), or narcissists, or actors (and not in the creative sense).

Chaos is where we are when we don't know where we are, and what we are doing when we don't know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand