Quotes About Ambiguity

It's a confusing sort of thing. he said. What is? Life.

There's no way to know what's going to happen, Folly. But we'll blood well be on our feet when it does.

What will I die with in my hand? A paintbrush (for houses), an M15 a hammer or ax, a book a gavel, a candlestick tiptoeing upstairs. What will I hold or will I be caught with this usual thing that I want to be my heart but it is my brain and I turn it over and over and over.

Everyone wishes a measure of mystery in their life that they have done nothing in particular to deserve.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

How could this nasty twerp be so ferally sexual dressed nearly as a boy?

It's—it's always lightest j-just before the dark.

Maybe it don't seem to make sense for a fella to be doing things for a reason that he don't know about. But I reckon I've been doing it most of my life.

No me atrevería a decir que te equivocas, aunque tampoco podría darte la razón.

We cannot know the mystery of the future.

A gente quer passar um rio a nado, e passa; mas vai dar na outra banda é num ponto muito mais embaixo, bem diverso do em que primeiro se pensou. Viver nem não é muito perigoso?

Sou o culpado do que nem sei, de dor em aberto, no meu foro. Soubesse - se as coisas fossem outras.

It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact plane on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word nothing were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.

I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting.

I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.

Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think of nothing to do but walk downtown, check out the Bon Marche for clothes she could not afford, buy a cracked crab for dinner and take a taxi home.

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.