Quotes About Ambiguity

No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket.

For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers.

he found it difficult to discuss any of his activities, which seemed to him no more than the hole through which he was falling.

Singing wordlessly over the song's (and the album's) final moments, Bruce evokes the opening bars of "Something in the Night," and the chill cloaking the entire album: the creeping suspicion that the things that make you feel the most alive will turn out to be some combination of unobtainable, worthless, and self-destructive.

Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation. The urge to resolve ambiguity can be surprisingly potent, even when the subject is inconsequential.

The Army and Navy Journal labeled the latest raids simply "one more chapter in the old volume," the result of alternately feeding and fighting the tribes. "We go to them Janus-faced. One of our hands holds the rifle and the other the peace-pipe, and we blaze away with both instruments at the same time. The chief consequence is a great smoke—and there it ends.

When the weatherman spoke he did so in smooth, rolling clauses, full of long words such as schoolmasters use when they are teasing a favored pupil, but he told them very little about himself. His talk was like cotton candy, that huge sweet bauble that fills the eye but leaves little in your belly when you've eaten it.

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.

this quest for certainty is running on fumes.

And again, the genius of the laws is their ambiguity, not their clarity, for their ambiguity is the very thing that allows them to gain new life with each passing year, ensuring that past and present forever remain connected and in dialogue.

The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition.

The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. And again, the same could be said of people of faith today.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.

Strict legalism is a myth. Laws have a knack for ambiguity, and it only takes a moment of reflection to see that they have to be interpreted, which isn't exactly breaking news. The entire history of Judaism and Christianity bears witness to people of faith doing just that.

I've learned to be fine with not knowing.

a totally dried noose for one is to another an integrated text adept at the cards that ruin whimsy...

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

Hay que introducir tensión entre la expectativa y la incertidumbre.

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

Ich will zwei Menschen gleichzeitig sein. Der eine rennt weg.

If we all knew what was coming, maybe we wouldn't even stick around for it. Time present and time future.