Quotes About Ambiguity

in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity.

none of us knows anything. We think we know, then it turns out that we don't. The universe has a way of intervening. Of changing you. In the end, you don't know what you're seeking, and you don't know what you'll find.

This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.

I didn't even try to explain to him what I was seeing, the fine spreading web through which we had all tugged one another to this place, the multiple innocences that make guilt.

A breath of sound across the landing, almost imperceptible, like a shadow moving against blackness; then nothing.

I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.

Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.

Foreshadow, plot buster or red herring... only time will tell: P69 -- Cassie waited; in the evening light through the window her eyes looked huge, opaque and watchful. I knew she was giving me a chance to say, Fuck the hair clip, let's forget we ever found it. Even now the temptation, tired and profitless though it may be, is to wonder what would have happened if I had.

It's taken me this long to start thinking about what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal.

I felt different, changing. Like today was my day, if I could just figure out how. Like danger, but my danger, sweet tricky urgent luck, tumbling through the air, heads or tails?

I could get a fedora and a trench coat and a wisecracking sense of humor; she could sit poised at hotel bars with a slinky red dress and a camera in her lipstick, to snare cheating businessmen…. I almost laughed out loud.

Selena said, "Maybe they did have. People are complicated. When you're a little kid, you don't realize, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realize it's not that simple. Chris wasn't that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn't like realizing that. It bothered him, that he wasn't just one thing. I think it made him feel . . .

Often the discrepancy works for us: people don't know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance.

Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications.

Danielle wasn't sure if she was patient and wise, or if she was a tragedy unfolding slowly, one hot summer day at a time.

I'm sorry." About what?" He shrugged, made uncomfortable by the question."I'm not sure. It's a Canadian thing.

Nothing is ever what it seems and not everything is yours to see.

We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don't know what to do.

a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel; really it was just the hole that's in the middle of all bagels; 'i need to go read my blog to find out what my politics are

We'd had a bunch of classes together over the years, but I couldn't be sure we'd ever spoken one-on-one and now that made me sad.

about "closure" and how worthless it was—why was it that everyone these days needed resolution, why couldn't they just accept that life was messy, that it never ended neatly?

There weren't any villains though. The world was just complicated in various ways, and there weren't any obvious villains to be found. It was excruciating.

It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.

Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.