Quotes About Ambiguity

This is really clear to me now. Ever since, I've never felt as tepid of this place as other people do. Everything seems like a long, improbable afterlife.

he's a grey area, in a world that doesn't like grey areas, but the grey areas are where you find the complexity, it's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth.

Rather than say anything, I stood up and put my foot in the water, testing it. Testing the water, that is, not my foot. Though maybe it was my foot I was testing - whether it could tolerate the water's temperature. Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

but deep down he couldn't tell whether Nigel was joking or not. It was to become an increasingly familiar feeling over the next few years.

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.

Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.

theoretically sorry

Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

To herself, she was no longer the person who'd left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person.

She hated this feeling, the sensation of trying and failing to get her arms around something big. The way political opinions seemed always to be expressed with a total sureness of tone. The way that sureness was at odds with every true thought she'd ever had.

Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand as yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would either be soothed or disappointed, or both.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs

A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.

Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

Sometimes feelings are like that - not positive, not negative, just a lot.

but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.

there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.

Lui scrisse: Io non so come vivere Neanch'io, ma sto tentando. Non so come tentare

if I had an answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!