Quotes About Ambiguity

It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.

In an enigmatic tone Kevin said, 'What about going to the movies tomorrow night?

Frankly you look more like a goat man to me.

If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with / a starless dark. The day will become something / it's never been before, something for / which I have no name.

To ask the question and wait for the answer is to know that there will be no answer.

Las afirmaciones de identidad no están libres de consecuencias. Limitan tanto como robustecen. Para mí, prefiero no tener una de esas identidades sencillas y públicas. No sé lo que soy, y no me apetece especialmente saberlo.

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing. Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on.

You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman. Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.

Lo malo de la vida es que no sabes realmente si es un proceso descendente, no sabes en absoluto de qué se trata.

wants to have it both ways, rather like big corporations that give to charity and then try to reap PR benefits by hyping their altruism in their ads.

So basically they're just standing around, as people will, their luggage a vivid jumble at their feet, kind of bogged down, tired, with that so-near-and-yet type of tension, a sense of somewhere definite they must be at by a definite time, but no clear consensus on how to get there. Since they're late. As Dr. Ambrose might venture to observe, they're figuratively unsure about where to go from here .

Questions, all the questions, everything was a question and there were so few answers.

It was all supposed to be reassuring-but it wasn't. Not really.

The inherent flaw with democratic elections is that they peddle the repulsive stink of neither/nor as the sultry perfume of either/or.

This lack of second thoughts is the telltale heart of the American left. Why no reckoning? Because reckonings are conservative. They counsel against the heedless rush to redeem the ambiguous and mottled realities of the human condition. They prove that life is made better only incrementally and with great difficulty, but it is made worse—much worse—very easily.

The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.

I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting.

this might be the happy ending without the ending

After working for so long on being sure of each other, sure of this thing, suddenly we were unsure again.

It doesn't feel like a date. It doesn't feel like friendship. It feels like something that fell off the tightrope but hasn't yet hit the net.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.

I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too.

I've lost track of where friendship ends and falling begins. (this is the foolish refrain of the hopelessly devoted.) there are times I want to kiss you midsentence. undo the not-doing with one gesture.

Now she's lit by the warm orange spreading from the horizon as not-quite-day, becomes not-quite-night