Quotes About Ambiguity

Mystery is essential, they say. Mystery. Well, I was in one of those right now, and I couldn't say that I liked it very much.

It's... It's gross. Knowing there is something inside me that I don't understand. It's gross." - Allen Walker

It's hardly unheard of for both good and evil to be aimed at the same target.

The real doubt is the doubt that doubts that it doubts.

So, we began our travels knowing nothing, least of all where we were going.

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where—" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat. —Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The greatest fallacy: looking continually for an answer in things that are unanswerable.

Life should come with such a statement. No Promises. Just lots of hope.

Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety—and the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.

that anxiety has at its core disquietude caused by ambiguity and a strong inclination toward problem solving. When

Whether or not [a] story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape.

I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange." (Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks)

And you have held my hand for reasons not at all

Life needs a touch of mystery and not everything requires an answer

While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc.—there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not.

A masterpiece of vagueness.

Down here, in our Cajun Magic Kingdom, I'm the Statue of Liberty. La Liberté éclairant le monde. But uptown, where the mold and the mildew still reign supreme, I go by Tiffany Proulx, which sounds like Peru, only without the pesky e inside. Most people call me Tiff, as in a fight, albeit a very small one. More like a squabble. A misunderstanding that's bound to sort itself out. Just give it a little time is all.

Forecasts are difficult to make—particularly those about the future.

But the thing about maybes is that you can get lost in them and end up going nowhere.

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: "You ought", or: "This is the truth." It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it;

My intellect would wish for a clear-cut universe with no dim corners, but there are these cobwebs in the cosmos.

Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language.