Quotes About Uncertainty

they believe that a person's true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it's impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

a person's true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it's impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.

We are too kind, too willing--too unwilling too--reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want.

Han and Luke exchange, 'What next?' looks.

some sort of havey-cavey business where

We all assume that we have our tomorrows to look forward to, but we never truly know what's waiting just around the corner.

She was a mind floating in an ocean of confusion.

Nothing is certain, but if nothing is certain, how can we be certain that nothing is certain?

It seemed like five minutes later we were here, the Land That Time Forgot, watching the removal van disappear round the corner like a last hope.

The same week another disaster overtook us... vicious pelting of hail...What to do? We hardly know, but, as the saying goes, we have the bear by the tail and it looks like a poor time to let go.

She was always changing her mind, imagining all the roads not taken. She was spongy, and sponges can't make big life decisions.

And death is simple. Life is what's complicated

The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.

I found it paralyzingly difficult to make even the simplest decisions. So much hung in the balance, so many complicated parameters needed to be taken into consideration, yet always there was too little information, no way to know what outcomes could result. Life was a terrifying, invisible web of consequences. What mayhem might I unknowingly wreak by saying yes when I could have said no, by going east instead of west?

Of course, the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don't know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true.

In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work—all that productive, effective, focused work—kept her distracted and submerged all day. And drink—anesthetizing and constant—kept her too numb to feel at night.

The freedom to choose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

it can keep you actively worried about specific things, about what you ate last night, and how your clothes are fitting, and whether or not you should go to the gym—it does a masterful job of keeping less tangible, more daunting matters at bay. The flood of options is reduced to a manageable trickle. Unnamed anxieties are replaced with tangible ones.

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind

The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

Which is worse, she thinks, waiting for the sting, or the sting itself?

He tried to be a good man, to do the right things, to make the world a little better than it had been before he had put his stamp upon it. You could be generous with the love you gave, with the care you took with others. You could follow all the command- ments that made sense to you and still the world could sideswipe you. There was no cause and effect. There was no karma. The truth was that he wasn't so sure he understood how the world worked anymore.

How dreadful...to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules.