Quotes About Ambiguity

Cubitum eamus? What? Nothing.

It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.

I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.

All her grace was in her vagueness. Her voice was soft, her manner languid, her features blurred and dreamy.

Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming?

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.

And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.

But those sparkling blue shallows- so enticing at first glance- had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

Or--to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win.

the world is much stranger than we know or can say. And I know how you think, or how you like to think, but maybe this is one instance where you can't boil down to pure 'good' or pure 'bad' like you always want to do—? Like, your two different piles? Bad over here, good over here? Maybe not quite so simple.

Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: One of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light. And under it, in a different ink, maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well(?) -Richard

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

another paradoxical gem of my dad's: sometimes you have to lose to win.

it wasn't that the future...seemed bad or frightening so much as incomprehensible, a blot of black ink on the horizon.

never the way it seems—all good, all bad.

On the way to Francis's, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us. "That," said Henry, "is a very bad omen." But of what he wouldn't say.

She'd learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, "drawn towards her," but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.

The truth is, she has no idea how many have died at her hands. It's like counting the number of times you've had sex. Maybe you can remember the first fifty. After that, everything becomes a blur.

The security that we show sometimes, is not so certain of its presence

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

To enjoy your holiday in bed to the full, you should let it be vaguely understood that there is something amiss with you. Don't go into details, for they are not necessary; and, besides, you want to be dreamy more or less, and the dreamy state is not consistent with a definite ailment.