Quotes About Ambiguity

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Is that a knife in his hand or an ice cream cone? You'll never know until you taste it.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

The connoisseur's hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this rare and beautiful thing, whatever it may be, laced always with contempt for those too crude, too uneducated, or too simple to be able do so.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

This land does not go out of its way to provide happy endings

We weren't sure we located the Gabriella until this spring." Barrett tapped a black metal box resting

but I'm a trial lawyer, damn it. In the legal system, not everything is black-and-white. I make my living in the gray.

Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke." —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I couldn't shake the feeling that Guy was more complicated than a good-ole-boy mango grower and Schein had more secrets than Freud's Wolf Man.

These days, I try to act with integrity, but I'm a trial lawyer, damn it. In the legal system, not everything is black-and-white. I make my living in the gray.

Even the straightest path has two directions.

I've never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.

The labels on the little bottles and boxes do not tell you which one is the sleeping pill. Instead they have names, long strange names that slide out of shape while you are reading them. They sound like kings from history or alien planets. There are hundreds of them.

It doesn't matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you're right in the middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn't work – it's like that, or maybe it isn't, because you also feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody's throat….

Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers, especially when you do not know what the answers are. I didn't give a shit either way.

Everything that is not as it appears, I think it is from your country.

In the days before people asked questions of every innocent thing, before this relentless need to name, to label, to categorize. People had understood that life might be rich, complicated, ambiguous.

Sometimes it's possible for a decision to be right and wrong at the same time

Love is a word for unfinished business, I think.

The wrong answer is the right answer to a different question.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.

In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character.