Quotes About Ambiguity

Dialogue is a wolf in sheep's clothing—often pretending to be woolly and vague, actually all teeth and meaning. Even

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.

The world isn't large enough for heroes and monsters at once. There's too much danger of confusion between the two categories.

Are you the devil?" Yoth Begail whispered. "Am I the devil?

There aren't always answers. There isn't always a reason.

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?

I honestly cannot tell whether you are the most practical women I have ever met or the most deranged." "Why can't I be both

Ambiguity is the enemy of accomplishment.

innuendos—and sometimes they weren't even

But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

If you are a friend, why do you bite me so hard? If an enemy, why do you fawn on me?

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.

First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. & And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl.

Responding to a question about remarks attributed to him that he did not think were his: "I really didn't say everything I said."

The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing.

It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

There is always something Right in something that is Wrong and something Wrong in something that is Right.

The artist never entirely knows We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

I feel I am free but I know I am not.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.