Quotes About Doubt

He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's, any more. Instead, I am his. Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened. So Luke: what I want to ask you now, what I need to know is, Was I right? Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that, I was afraid to. I couldn't afford to lose you.

I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it's not Your doing; I don't believe for an instant that what's going on out there is what You meant. I have enough daily bread, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.

Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him.

Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don't seem so to me.

By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been afraid to pronounce them.

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both. That was how she had managed her own crisis. I said that I wasn't sure I would be able to choose. Secretly I feared that I would be unable to believe in either. Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?

We should not expect too much from faith," he said. "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion.

I still have it in me to feel sorry for him. Moira is right, I am a wimp.

The things I believe can't all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe all of them, all three versions of Luke, at once and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it.

He can't shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there's no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he's ungrateful by nature.

I waver, I waver. But tomorrow is another day.

Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.

If in doubt, play dumb," said Ada

I wanted to ask why it had to be like this, but I already knew the answer: because it was God's plan. That was how the Aunts got out of everything

For a time I almost believed what I understood I was supposed to believe. I numbered myself among the faithful for the same reason that many in Gilead did: because it was less dangerous.

She would rather see for herself; she doesn't trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back.

Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.

Melanie told me that all the early pictures of me had been burnt up in a fire. Only an idiot would have believed this, so I did.

Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.

Most of us discover early on that it's safer to hide behind prayers that can't be measured, petitions so nebulous they don't require intervention from God.

Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We're too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.

As Gustave Flaubert said, "I defend the poor Republic but I don't believe in it.