Quotes About Ambiguity

It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife

Meanwhile I'll probably see him again. That's how sick I am.

Merry sighed. "Once again, Andrew, you've opened my eyes. To what, I'm not sure.

Twin bells, those questions

We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity.

There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

I'll rise - but I won't shine.

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That's what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the "thou shalts" and "thou should", but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

His world was a confusing and treacherously shifting ground, and he did not see that he had any better way to deal with it than simply to keep marching on. It

He was waiting, and the waiting was painful. Not because he didn't know how to wait, but because he didn't know what he was waiting for.

an event that had the consistency of smoke and lacked anything of substance.

People are strange creatures, and they don't always have a clear eye toward how things stand.

How could something so wrong grow out of something that had started out so right?

It is conceivable that not knowing the meaning of life is part of the meaning of life, rather as not counting how many words I am uttering when I give an after-dinner speech helps me to give an after-dinner speech. Perhaps life is kept going by our ignorance of its fundamental meaning, as capitalism for Karl Marx

Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of 'form'.

Modern poets like Frost still want to make 'deep' statements; but they are also more sceptical of such high-sounding generalities than many of their forebears. So, rather like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land , they gesture enigmatically to such profundities while at the same time being nervous of committing themselves to them.

Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, 'On the contrary.

Macbeth as a whole is awash with questions, sometimes questions responded to by another question, which helps to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoid suspicion.

o fato de que os indivíduos esteja mais felizes significa que será mais difícil dizer o que eles estarão fazendo às cinco da tarde de uma quarta-feira

So are you happy? he asks. I hate it when anyone asks me that. It's such a loaded fucking question. Are they talking aggregate years? Doesn't it depend on the day, the moment? Or are they referring to last year or last month?

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

Good and bad is tricky, she said. I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face.