Quotes About Ambiguity

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Everything is not black-and-white. I'm really interested in the gray area - not justifying it, not glorifying it, not condoning it, but at least having people see there's a genesis for every event in our lives. There's some divine order to it, whether it's ugly or beautiful.

Some of the best ugly sweaters, people really can't put their finger on the concept of the sweater itself.

Ultimately, it's a pretty confusing moment.

Ultimately what I'll do next is up in the air for me.

Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story; we do not know where we are in the story. We do not know who, ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end.

An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.

The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief.

The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.

It's an unbelievable, absurd paradox that we have to put one step in front of the other every day without knowing which one will be our last.

The XCX really stands for 'kiss Charli kiss,' which is unbelievably crap.

The world has always been uncertain. This is the nature of the world.

Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.

The future is inherently uncertain.

The best scheme of Phonetics is a stiff uncertain thing.

I frequently hear our present period described as uncertain, confused, chaotic.

The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.

I didn't even realize that I was interested in film until I was in college, and since then, I've had a very uncertain and sort of lost decade.

I mean, the type of art that I enjoy is art that - I enjoy a very broad spectrum, but I especially like art that leaves me a little confused and uncertain as to what just happened.

The outlook for the economy, as always, is highly uncertain.

I find it very interesting to keep people uncertain about what is what and figure it out as they go.

I know the hole he went in at, but I can't tell you what hole he will come out of.

War for most men is not fighting or marching in parades. It is sitting around somewhere wondering what the hell you are supposed to be doing.

A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.