Quotes About Ambiguity

Northern Virginia could never decide whether it was a suburb of New York or a part of the Confederacy.

to be in the middle distance, and he was not perceptibly

I don't know," sighed

But I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey... They are both oaks, even if they were planted in different forests. But then, m'lord, we all suffer in our different ways from being prisoners of birth.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

As meninas estavam enormes naqueles vestidos de cerimónia, construídos à volta de uma estrutura de arame. Tinham quilos e quilos de cabelo, bem presos, na cabeça. Embriagadas, beijando-nos, ou a desmaiar nas cadeiras, estavam destinadas ao ensino superior, aos maridos, à educação dos filhos, à infelicidade que dificilmente se percebia - enfim, à vida.

But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over backyard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists' offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.

She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand

You want me to be philosophic about the future now? Cal said. I'm not even sure where I left my pants.

I don't like futons. They can't commit. I'm a bed! I'm a couch! I'm a bed! I'm a couch!

Is life a happy sadness? Or a sad happiness?

All these attempts to impose order and fairness on a naturally random and unfair universe endorse the borderline's futile struggle to choose only black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But the world is neither intrinsically fair nor exact; it is composed of subtleties that require less simplistic approaches. A healthy civilization can accept the uncomfortable ambiguities. Attempts to eradicate or ignore uncertainty tend only to encourage a borderline society.

the world is neither intrinsically fair nor exact; it is composed of subtleties that require less simplistic approaches.

I feel like I'm playing chess underwater. The pieces keep floating away. I don't know where things are. I can't figure out tomorrow.

Or maybe you're merely uncomfortable with uncertainty. Like the rest of the human race.

Sometimes I feel like a writer, sometimes I just feel like a snitch.

In some versions of the story, the boy had been tortured, made to drink the blood of his captors, and forced to walk home naked. Except no one seemed to have a name to go with their stories. Who had been attacked?

His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about. "Please," Pasquale rasped to Tommaso. "Go." The

He] mumbled something about how being a Hungarian meant wanting nothing and being prepared for anything. Or was it the other way around.

What is meant by 'nut bag'? Is that a testicular reference or merely the identification of a satchel of cashews or pecans?

There is so much gray between the black and the white and this is where most of us live, trying, but so often failing, to bend towards the light.

I want to say, she begins again, I want to say that I have not always tried hard enough to know. That this 'moral compass' Claire talks about may not have been as helpful in my own personal life as it was in the wider political context. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly from a distance. And what is up close -- what is up close -- she falters -- is harder to make out. In the audience someone coughs. There is so much gray between the black and the white ... and this is where most of us live.

Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it says 'Chicken by the Sea.

The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.