Quotes About Ambiguity

He said a political writer must be careful. He quoted Auden: A writer's politics are more dangerous to him than his cupidity. He said, Political sentimentality is as bad as any other kind. You have to acknowledge ambiguity, complexity. There is a kind of death that creeps into your prose when you're trying to illustrate a principle, no matter how worthy.

You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future

It was not warm and not cold. There was no wind and the sky was very low and grey but it wasn't raining. It was like they'd completely run out of weather.

The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that tantalized the tongue.

The longer I wait the more reasons I can think of why it means something other than what I thought it meant when I first read it.

It's a scary thing; moving on. Part of me wishes life were more predictable and part of me is excited that it's not. I think it's impossible to tell the good things from the bad things while they're happening.

There are only two forces at work in this world- black and white. Only people are grey.

I'm torn between maintaining you as an entity to write to and talking with you as a person.

Europe was now more economically complex, as we have seen; with that complexity came ambiguities of all kinds. And it is in societies where complexity and ambiguity give space for pragmatic solutions that women have in general found it most possible to negotiate space for their own protagonism.

The element of uncertainty is one of night's special pleasures.

this is a two-fold country, and, what's more, everyone in it is two-fold, one part possibility and the other its refutal

Das hat mich nicht traurig gemacht, damals, aber irgendwie hat es das doch. Ich weiß auch nicht wieso.

I am halfway between two worlds, the known and the unknown. I feel as transparent as the wind, as if my spirit is hovering in the sky, waiting to land. I am driving toward a future I can't see, leaving behind a past that already feels distant. Nothing is clear - and yet the trees are sharp against the sky; I can see the hard outlines of everything.

Toute démarche qui tend à nous faire mieux accepter les contraintes sociales est dangereuse, et ne peut en aucun cas être qualifiée de "libératrice". C'est pourquoi la "revalorisation du corps des femmes", sans autre précision, est un projet extrêmement ambigu.

Tatty says oh yes, she knows what he's like. But when she thinks about it, she doesn't.

It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.

Uncharted territory," I said. "The parts on the maps of our lives that we don't understand. In cartographer's language they call these places sleeping beauties.

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through.

Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.

Did you break into Anthony Mead's home?' 'I couldn't even tell you where that might be. Home Counties are all the one to me.' That was payback for Pine saying London, Los Angeles and Scotland. Really sticking it to them here. 'So you know his house is in the Home Counties.

since 'nothing can be begun with certainty, it's better we begin with doubt'.

They say one thing and another thing and both at once;

I find it most remarkable that we who are so intimately involved in the battle between good and evil are even more involved with the shades of gray in between them.

I'm a man of no convictions. At least, I think I am.