Quotes About Ambiguity

He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.

The right ending is an open door you can't see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.

He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.

writer, I cannot remember who, spoke of a person having "a confusing grace." With an uncertainty alongside her warmth, that is how Emily has always been for me. You trusted her but she didn't trust herself. She was "good," but she was not that way in her own eyes. Those qualities still had not balanced out somehow, or agreed with each other. She

negative capability," the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality.

For though we may be the earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role—that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

I sing, but I don't think of myself as a singer.

Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single person who, you know, a good person who has done bad things.

I don't believe really good plays - interesting plays, complicated plays - can mean just one thing to every single person in the audience.

Every single thing you do, you don't really have expectations.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

We don't know what we're doing. We don't have a plan. We don't sit down and calculate it.

One falls to the ground in trying to sit on two stools.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white.

Cheryl's artistically inclined. She draws and sketches, but I don't know about acting.

Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.

Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.

I don't really love computers.

I love stories that frame that: This is what life is about - you don't have a clue.

I love movies that ask big questions but don't necessarily answer everything. I like people walking out thinking about something.