Quotes About Ambiguity

What else could have happened? Car wouldn't start? House caught on fire? Escaped convict climbed through his bedroom window and tied him with duct tape? Poison eggnog? Or maybe I just didn't matter to him.

But whether he was happy or not it is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. He had memories to disturb him and a plant hasn't, but after the first bad night his memories were quiet.

Just definitions either prevent or put an end to a dispute.

Hers to be his to be hers ad infinitum, smoke smudging the bell of her throat. To what had been or might've been her thoughts migrated, cloth wall he pressed his hand against, he of the indelicate embrace.

They sat cross-legged on the floor, short of lotus, lay back between table and couch. In the upset zone known as not yet there they reconvened, she unexpected harmony's ghost, another she recondite solace's regret. . . They sat on the floor sipping herb as we looked on, incense an androgyne funk, flesh crevice, book of anabatic recess

We were never promised precision in this life... With the gift of agency to mankind, life cannot possibly present a perfectly tidy picture. The ambiguities of circumstances are partly, if not largely, the cumulative result of our varied use of our moral agency, but also of the structure of life itself.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine - I'm here." "Is there something wrong with that?" "Absolutely.

Being a villain, it seems, provides a certain amount of indisputable clarity." -- Commander Invincible

What the fuck do I mean? I mean . . . (Beat.) Well, I, shit, I dunno! But you see what I'm getting at, don't you?

The thing about my music is, there really is no point.

The problem with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.

What these people were trying to create or re-create here in this new world is beyond me. I can't put myself in their minds or their hearts, but I can sympathize with their struggle for an identity, with their puzzlement, which has troubled Americans from the very beginning - Who are we, where do we fit in, where are we going?

Nothing is black or white.

there really is no such thing as 'the future', singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.

Most of the time you don't estimate the good or the bad you do and you have to operate on a small and labouring engine of hope with a blind windscreen and pray you're going in a direction

La mente umana, anche una mente minuscola, aborrisce l'ambiguità

There's an anticipated, ambiguous grief; a premature mourning of the self, or of the beloved other. During dementia's last stages, a beloved person may be there and yet absent, a powerful reminder of the self's loss.

Military Intelligence' is an oxymoron, just like 'Government Organisation' is. A bloody game with no rules.

A drawn line can be many things," he says, whereas a digitized line has to be just one thing.27

In Google's world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there's little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought.

Translation is a tricky business," Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. "Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads.

A text always remains in crucial ways 'imperceptible'.

A writer can never have complete command or mastery over what s/he writes. Neither can a reader.