Quotes About Confusion

We've been led astray by rationalist thought," Diotallevi said. "I keep telling you.

The trouble is," I said, "I can no longer distinguish the accidental difference among Waldensians, Catharists, the poor of Lyons, the Umiliati, the Beghards, Joachimites, Patarines, Apostles, Poor Lombards, Arnoldists, Williamites, Followers of the Free Spirit, and Luciferines. What

Graecum est, non legitur," I finished his sentence, humiliated. "It is Greek to me." "Exactly;

Truly it seemed that a great people had gone mad; but it is a fact well known to alienists that you cannot convince a madman of his own condition, and only make him madder by trying.

Great moments do not last in a confused and helter-skelter world. The idealist dreams how things ought to go, but they don't—there being no perfect human creatures or groups of them.

What were the workers going to do in the face of such a situation? Arm themselves? But that gave the enemy a basis for charging that the workers were planning civil war. The reactionaries had nine-tenths of the money, also nine-tenths of the press with which to spread confusion and fear. Said Raoul: "The extreme Left has Russia for a pattern and the Right has Italy and Germany, but where is the pattern for those who believe in the democratic process?

Very certainly Franklin Roosevelt would never have been able to launch his New Deal if men such as these had not been sowing the seeds of collectivist thought for a couple of generations. When you met the sowers, and discovered what a variety of seeds they carried, you were better able to understand the confusion and groping of the early New Deal.

But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.

A cold case was a story, constructed piece by piece. Sometimes the pieces arrived in the wrong order so it made no sense at first...at the end, if you found all the pieces, you had a coherent tale. Sometimes, though, you ended up with a stack of ill-assorted bits that didn't quite fit...Then it was like one of those novels that won literary prizes, the ones where you got to the end, closed the book and asked yourself, 'What just happened here?

Your heart is raw and bleeding. Everything is strange and terrible.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal.

He felt as though his brain were on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how she had looked at him! She seemed more beautiful than ever before. Beautiful with a beauty that combined all of the woman with all of the angel, a beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. He felt as though he were swimming in the deep blue sky. At the same time he was horribly disconcerted, because there was dust on his boots.

Who knows how easily ambition disguises itself under the name of a calling, possibly in good faith and deceiving itself, in sanctimonious confusion?

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it.

Ever since you were a girl, you've been running for what you wanted... Now you're lost, but you're still running full speed... How will you ever figure out what you want when everything is a blur?

They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

She was sure he saw some spatter of blood or dirt somewhere on her, at her temple or on the back of her hand. There was an almost imperceptible pause; she knew he was waiting for her to look at him, to communicate what had happened, but she just sat there. If she opened her mouth she might start screaming. Or if she looked at him she might cry, might demand to know how it was that children could be shot in the dark for nothing.

They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don't belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps.

I don't understand. This is America. How can this be happening to us?

Yes. There is one God, and he lives in the sky, and he hears all of us. It is just that here on earth, we are confused about how to believe in him. But what does it matter, as long as we trust he is there?

Oh, for goodness' sake, there's your rabbit-in-the-headlights look again." He rolled his eyes, "Now, be a sport and hold my hand, will you? Your solider friend is coming back.

You got the library wrong, Eva.