Quotes About Ambiguity

And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don't always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that's beyond you, and never understand why.

What does the border look like?" A child's question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's a defiance in that, too.

Was this first contact, or last contact?

You wouldn't understand me even if I made sense.

Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came

The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.

the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon.

E, então, o tempo, o tempo verdadeiramente físico, não se orienta pelo relógio; ele é antes, e no mais das vezes, uma função da atmosfera na qual transcorre. É, portanto, extraordinariamente difícil determinar, mesmo aproximadamente, quando um se juntou de fato à companhia dos outros, quando o outro se levantou e quando o terceiro realmente partiu.

Allora non sapevo ancora cosa è la vastità, eppure lo intuivo: il poter contenere in sé moltissime cose, anche tra loro contraddittorie, sapere che tutto ciò che sembra inconciliabile sussiste tuttavia in un suo ambito, e questo sentirlo senza perdersi nella paura, e anzi sapendo che bisogna chiamarlo col suo nome e meditarci sopra: ecco la cosa che proprio da mia madre ho imparato, ed è la vera gloria della natura umana

The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.

Many people in the early 1960s shared a sense that things had gone horrifically wrong, without having a clear idea of how or when they would change.

Half of the things are as they seem. The other half, who knows. This has always been true.

all of our lives, we long to know what our future will be. It is a mercy we do not know.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

couldn't say what precisely

Well, that's what they said. (It could have just been indigestion, though.)

most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.

The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.

Not everything has an answer." Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor.

I've spent so much time these last years wondering what I'm supposed to be. A wife? A lover? A celibate? An Italian? A glutton? A traveler? An artist? A Yogi? But I'm not any of these things, at least not completely. And I'm not Crazy Aunt Liz, either. I'm just a slippery antevasin - betwixt and between - a student on the ever-shifting border near the wonderful, scary forest of the new.

I'm not sure anybody out there really knows what they're doing. Apparently not

To be honest, I didn't understand what I was doing at college, aside from fulfilling a destiny whose purpose nobody had bothered explaining to me.

I don't think painters have the answers about a painting except the painting itself. Anyway, a painting has to have some kind of mystery to it to make it work.