Quotes About Ambiguity

I can no longer see a path in any path.

Better to live in doubt than to die in certainty.

What we are probably given is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

I was suddenly stricken with a feeling of black despair, hopelessly muddled by what was right and wrong. Nothing seemed clear cut; we did evil in the name of good, and good was done in the name of evil. [Chapter 27, page 306]

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

Suppose we received from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn't pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and demand to be received and interpreted.

Si una noche de invierno un viajero, fuera del poblado de Malbork, asomándose desde la abrupta costa sin temor al viento y al vértigo, mira hacia abajo donde la sombra se adensa en una red de líneas que se entrelazan, en una red de líneas que se intersecan sobre la alfombra de hojas iluminadas por la luna en torno a una fosa vacía, «¿Cuál historia espera su fin allá abajo?», pregunta, ansioso de escuchar el relato.

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the acton changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.

Gerçek ?u ki gündüzün ?????nda, bu yay?lm??, soluk, hemen hemen gölgesiz ayd?nl?kta geceninkinden de daha koyu bir karanl?k buluyorum.

In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can't imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.

Brzask] jest to pora, kiedy przedmioty trac? konsystencj? cienia, jak? darzy?a je noc, i odzyskuj? po trochu w?a?ciwe sobie barwy; ale najpierw przechodz? jeszcze przez co? niby stref? po?redni?, niejasn?, zaledwie mu?ni?te czy raczej otoczone doko?a ?wiat?em: o tej porze mniej ni? kiedykolwiek ma si? pewno?? istnienia ?wiata.

On sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.

Certo il costo da pagare è alto ma dobbiamo accettarlo: non poterci distinguere dai tanti segnali che passano per questa via, ognuno con un suo significato che resta nascosto e indecifrabile perché fuori di qui non c'è più nessuno capace di riceverci e d'intenderci.

There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

A pause. Then Ludmilla's voice resumes slowly as if she were trying to express something not easily defined. "Yes, it is. I like it very much… Still, I wish the things I read weren't all present, so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don't quite know what, the sign of some unknown thing…

Ali nije samo to: u dnevnoj svjetlosti u tom difuznom blijedom sjaju bez sjena nalazim tamu još guš?u od no?ne.

each door you open is the wrong one, you withdraw in confusion, you seem to be lost in the book with white pages, unable to get out of it.

For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, a kind of noman's land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it— a trap.