Quotes About Ambiguity

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,' he had reported, 'after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface – one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it!

Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.

In another paradox that des Esseintes would have appreciated, it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.

THE REALITY: You are not getting what you want because your intentions are mixed, unclear, or contrary to what you say you want. When you clarify your intentions, your desired results will follow.

When a diplomat says 'yes' he means 'maybe.' When a diplomat says 'maybe' he means 'no.' But if a diplomat says 'no' he's no diplomat.

Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions.

It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined.

If the physical world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and good, it would not have the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky.

They claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman. It's too late. Always has been, always will be…too late.

Nothing's that simple, not even things that are simply awful.

I'm not exactly sure what happened. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! ~ JOKER

It was Kovacs who said Mother then, muffled under latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again.

Okay. There it is. I dressed up. As an owl. And fought crime. Perhaps you begin to see why I half expect this summary of my career to raise more laughs than poor cuckolded Moe Vernon with his foam teats and his Wagner could ever hoped to have done.

In the heart of darkness, a flower blossoms, enriching the shadows with its promise of hope... In the fields of light, an adder coils, and the radiant tranquility is lent savor by its sinister presence. Right and wrong, black and white, good and evil...all my existence I have looked from one to the other, fully embracing neither one...never before have I understood how much they depend on each other.

Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation. I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.

in life there were times when the entirely inappropriate was the only appropriate response. Perhaps

The brightest has a gathering of people stood about it. Trapped beneath their heels, stretched shadows shy back from the flames, yet do not jump or dance. What are they burning there, so still by night? My

Let's never forget that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.

To grow up is to endure the equivocal, to permit the ambiguous.

Sances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

It's the Indian headshake. It means you are probably right, or probably wrong. Who knows? Varuna has but a thousand eyes, Indra a hundred, you and I only two.