Quotes About Ambiguity

But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.

Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank.

Hay ciertas extrañas ocasiones y coyunturas en este raro asunto entremezclado que llamamos vida, en que uno toma el entero universo por una enorme broma pesada, aunque no llega a discernirle su gracia sino vagamente, y tiene algo más que sospechas de que la broma no es a expensas sino de él mismo.

Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.

Smiling is the chosen vehicle of ambiguities.

enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall.

ESCH (sumido en sus pensamientos): En sueños, la verdad camina siempre con muletas... (Da un golpe sobre la mesa.) El mundo entero camina con muletas... Un aborto que cojea.

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

the thunder has sounded--but who knows where the rain's going to fall.

Grief needs an outlet. Creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child's contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent's death represents precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression.

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.

It was the new politics of ambiguity—speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control.

Among her female friends, lesbians were particularly prominent: her closest friends in New York were Elsie de Wolfe and her partner, the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, as well as Anne Morgan and her lover Ann Harriman Vanderbilt, and in Paris she was friendly with the lesbian novelist Natalie Barney and her circle. Lucy admired these independent, forthright women, and according to Randy Bryan Bigham, "a sexual ambiguity on Lucy's part is possible.

I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague that there was no sense talking about it.

You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways--but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

Some of them carry paralytic rabies, but it is hard to know which ones.

Most people inhabit a universe that is like French café au lait—fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage.

The man who was only a silhouette. She

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

No one can predict which of life's vexations insomnia will favour.

he went back upstairs to stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. Who was he? Captain of the second fifteen? An abject housebound halfwit in his pyjamas? He didn't know.

Life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It's more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly's eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths.

It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this.

I looked at him. You really need to work on your threats. I can't tell if you're threatening me or inviting me for tea.