Quotes About Ambiguity

Nick e Joanne guardavano l'incendio tenendosi stretti, ma mentre lei gli accarezzava distrattamente una spalla, Nick fu assalito dalla sensazione familiare, che ogni tanto lo attanagliava, di non sapere bene a cosa lei stesse pensando.

The woman and the white-haired old man looked at the clock, as if it might tell them something about their situation and what they were supposed to do next.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can't tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one

I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.

They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don't find out they don't know themselves.

in a voice with half the steps missing.

Uh-huh. Could be,' I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn't have a damn thing more to say.

A rua estava escura de qualquer coisa mais que a noite.

He would be like that for the rest of his life and that is what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world.

She had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blond, that hasn't enough life in it to be ginger, and isn't clean enough to be grey.

You're as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?" "Sure." "You can call me Vivian." "Thanks, Mrs. Regan." "Oh, go to hell, Marlowe." She went on out and didn't look back.

I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward. (in The Man With the Golden Typewriter).

What is he?' 'What would you have him be?

The concept of privacy has become too vague and unwieldy a concept to perform useful analytical work. This ambiguity has actually undermined the importance of this value and encumbered its effective protection.

you don't have the memory of your future; {that}the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine.

Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you're doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark.

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.

What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether

Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up.

128We want both, to burn it down and be no one and to be recognized by the dog on the daily walk up the drive from work and we get both but never exactly when and how we imagined it.