Quotes About Ambiguity

Money? in a voice that rustled.

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.

The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn't tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

We have no future because our present is too volatile.

But perhaps, she thinks, this isn't a Russian meal. Perhaps it's a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.

None of their voices were real, even; it was all digital stuff. God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people, or all three of the ones he'd seen there might've been just one person.

If you believe the journalists, he's the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there's the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No.

And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements.

Which had a top layer of truth to it, but latticed, like the caramel on the cronuts.

I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can't know.

And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy's, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he'd been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would.

What was real seemed illusive and without definition.

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

I know something you do not know. I am not left-handed either.

Who can know when his world is going to change? Who can tell before it happens, that every prior experience, all the years, were a preparation for . . . nothing.

don't come out all that well a lot of the time, but that can't be helped.

If you write movies, you never know who the enemy is. Someone is going to fuck you, that's a given.

Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and opens a region though they fail to give a map.

To say that one need art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.

He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger's pedestrian.