Quotes About Ambiguity

Americans see everything too simply—a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.

If you told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That's always the way.

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

We don't know whether they're going to eat us or elect us for their tribal deities.

She's...just a girl, you know. Like most girls: something and nothing.

Es war ekelerregend, es war sauberste Arbeit, und es verwirrte zutiefst.

In his perversity, or his genius, or both

Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

The pleasure of the supernatural short story lies in not having to explain anything. They're just glimpses, a momentary lifting of the veil.

There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noonday visions and midnight glory. Time in abundance. For nothing ever begins. And this story, having no beginning, will have no end

Give me ambiguity or give me something else.

He was the type of man women said they hated, they absolutely hated, they absolutely and categorically hated, and then they went to bed with him. I was the type of man women said they hated, and then they went home.

But it was a shouldn't with a hint of should.

Real life is disobliging. People like to think, or feel, in black and white. Having to assess the relative values of all those intermediate greys is tiresome and perplexing.

Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…

Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.

Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.

Things are pretty much status quo with the sexual-tension friend.

The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument and no one telling you what happened. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying KO's and low blows and devising too-late parries. You didn't know what it had been about or who'd won, just that nobody wanted to talk about it, they glance around and knead grudges in their fists.

A force from above held him down, and a counterforce from below bore him aloft. He hovered on unexceptionality.

This slow debate about the rain: it's not about rain at all, but the fragility of what we know. We're all just guessing.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.

There was something of the beautiful failure about her.