Quotes About Ambiguity

We have to get used to the idea that at the most important crossroads in our life there are no signs.

Also, he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister.

THE GAMBLER,THE NUN & THE RADIO I do not follow you. Many times I do not follow myself with pleasure.

do you want me to shoot thee, ingles ?... quieres ? it is nothing.

He did not know what made him feel as he did. But

I'm going back to Mike." I could feel her crying as I held her close. "He's so damned nice and he's so awful. He's my sort of thing.

Why did you do it? — I don't know. There isn't always an explanation for everything. — Oh isn't there? I was brought up to think there was. — That's awfully nice. — Do we have to go on and talk this way? — No. — That's a relief. Isn't it?

Something's going on in Cordell's room, but I'm not sure I want to know what it is.

He invites us to recognize that our values evolve as we mature and "move from an understanding of ethical and moral issues in black and white absolutist terms to comprehending the gray ambiguity of most matters."6

In uncertainty lies the seed of wanting.

Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away with, it may not increase intimacy, but compromise it.

O]ur willingness to engage that mystery keeps desire alive. Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. [...] Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination. We remain interested in our partners; they delight us, and we're drawn to them.

A term used by Terry Real is quite apt for such affairs: stable ambiguity. These are relationships of undefined status but well-established patterns, hard to break out of but just as hard to depend on. By remaining in a diffuse state, people avoid both loneliness and commitment. This strange mix of comforting consistency and uncertainty is increasingly common to relationships in the age of Tinder, but it's long been characteristic of extramarital liaisons.

Ulla Sallert, wearing one of her famous facial expressions with about eleven ambivalent meanings and twenty-three enigmatic nuances, drops into a deep curtsy.

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life.

The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don't mean to imply that I'm any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn't mean anything at all.

El lógico (al Señor anciano): Aquí tiene un silogismo ejemplar. El gato tiene cuatro patas. Isidoro y Fricot tienen cada uno cuatro patas. Por lo tanto Isidoro y Fricot son gatos. El señor anciano (al Lógico): Mi perro también tiene cuatro patas. El lógico (al Señor anciano): Entonces es un gato.

Note, too, that fiction writers inevitably catch their central characters in situations involving ambiguities, not contradictories. The marshal in High Noon was being asked to choose not between a good and a bad but between two goods (or two bads, depending upon your angle of view).

I noted a second time appreciation for the author's making room for intuition in the sermon process. Most of us give lip service to the fact that preaching is an art as well as a science, but then we become afraid that someone will think we speak of preaching as an art as an excuse for ambiguity, sloppy thinking, and poor reasoning. In defense, we omit all art and artistry and proceed to offer the reader an adequate technology for framing and delivering the message.

Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the fog was rolling in over the city or whether the city was drifting out to meet it.

What happens at the end of a story? Something changes, or it doesn't. I like it best when things just stop.

She couldn't decide if he was a bit mad or if the world moved too slowly for him. Perhaps a little of both.

Nothing stand out and says screams 'suspicious