Quotes About Uncertainty

Catherynne M. Valente

The trouble was, September didn't know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it was merry, she might dash after a Spoon and it would all be a grand adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party at the end with red lanterns. But if it was a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving with snow and arrows and enemies.

Yes, September, We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one aught to let him in to dinner.

For when a box is shut, you cannot tell what it might contain, so you might as well say it contains everything, because, really, it could contain anything, see? But when you open it, you affect what is inside. Observing something changes it, that's a law, nothing to be done.

Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.

It's like Great-Aunt Goguenar's Sixth Unkillable Fact: 'Everything just gets so fucked up sometimes and the natural resting state of reality is not to make any goddamned sense if it can help it and you've just got to accept that because it's not going to get any better from here on in.'

Lives have apocalypses, too. You just can't know when you're in it until the water is already closing over your head and all you can hear are volcanoes, one after the other, detonating the possibility of the future you imagined.

But you can't ever imagine what you're going to care about when you turn into the version of you that's waiting on the other side of five years from now. That's a stranger waiting to ambush you, and all you can do is plant your feet and try not to get thrown.

It's the Sea of Restlessness," he said. "Fills you up with go go go, like you're a bowl full of reaching and wanting but you don't know what you're reaching and wanting for.

I've no idea what I shall do when I am grown! I don't suppose there is much call for Knights or Bishops or Heroines in Omaha or even Chicago. And I'm sure other girls are much better at it than I.

I am sorry," said the machine, slumping at the shoulders. "I will try to have the right answer, if you will come back later." I put my hand on the creature's shoulder. "It's all right; I don't know, either. But spiders are funny and determined things, and must be treated carefully." "Yes," she said. "It is the same with clocks".

You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That

Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?

I can't decide if I want a baby. And my friends who have kids don't make very good salesmen. They're like, "Oh you learn all this great stuff, like how to survive on two hours' sleep." If I want to learn that I'll just become a political prisoner or something.

her footsteps on the stairs. I was expecting

looked straight at her. 'Donna, I think Edna

There are things I want in life - things I need, things I mean to do,' Olivia went on. 'I just don't know what they are.

He who risks nothing has nothing.

Go with your gut. Sometimes things defy explanation - and who knows where it will lead?

The writer Jeff Chang writes that "I want to love us" but he says that he can't bring himself to do that because he doesn't know who "us" is. I share that uncertainty. Who is us? What is us? Is there even such a concept as an Asian American consciousness?

I'm… having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don't know who I am.

?d? et am?. Qu?r? id faciam fortasse requ?ris. Nesci?, sed fier? senti? et excrucior.

Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum illuc, unde negant redire quemquam. Ahora él va por camino tenebroso allí, donde niegan volver a nadie.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can't control it. Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.