Quotes About Ambiguity

Things aren't always

My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of herself? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the truth. Maybe self was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe very time you met her, she would be somebody else.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that's not the same thing. —Joseph Conrad

There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark.

Norman said, "Sometimes there are no winners and it's all a wash," mindful that anything said was enough, and at times, nothing was demanded save the presence of another.

no longer tell if he was upset by being so far

I guess. I don't remember his name but it

Looks like it,' Winston said.

Michael Connelly

Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

Nothing is obvious.

I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.

Louis: "I tried to be good. I tried to be open and free." Clarissa: "We all tried. I'm not sure the organism is fully capable.

For some it is the end of the rope. For others it is only the beginning.

no one knew what was going on! It was completely open to interpretation. And his guess was as good as anyone's. My God, probably even better.

While progressing in this way, with a dirty street ahead of him and a clean one behind, he often had grand ideas. They were ideas that couldn't easily be put into words, though - ideas as hard to define as a half-remembered scent or a colour seen in a dream.

Why did *I* lock the door? Why did YOU lock the door? Someone locked the door...

Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, "It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms.

Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading," said Amos. "They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Clark knew that the time would come to put a smiley corporate face on his ferocious ambition.

Morgan Stanley wanted to be able to trade for itself in a way it could not trade for its customers; it just didn't want to seem as if it wanted to.

The nearest we ever come to knowing truth is when we are witness to a paradox.