Quotes About Uncertainty

I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are so lost.

No man can say whether you are happy or not until you die, for no man knows misfortunes may overtake you or what misery may be yours in place of all this slendor.

Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. You don't know where it'll carry you, and it's a terrifying thing, love. It's the only possibility but it's terrifying.

Fear and love cannot long remain in the same bed together. And how many nights I lay there, while Barbara slept, filled with an indescribable bewilderment; feeling that all that held me to life was being gnawed away, and feeling myself sink, like a weighted corpse, deeper and deeper in the sea of uncertainty.

She was like a wild animal who didn't know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

She knew that he was going to leave her. It was in his walk, his talk, his eyes. He wanted to go. He had already moved back, crouching to leap. And she had no rival. He was not going to another woman. He simply wanted to go. It would happen today, tomorrow, three weeks from today; it was over, she could do nothing about it; neither could she save herself by jumping first.

This was the summer in which they all abruptly began to grow older, their bodies becoming troublesome and awkward and even dangerous and their voices not to be trusted.

I supposed he wouldn't start doubting her until he started doubting everything.

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

That's what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM

None of us can predict with certainty the twists and turns our lives will take.

That's what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.

There's an old saying, Buck said. A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty of them you're a damn genius.

while they circle the drain. What else?

Who knows what tomorrow will bring Tomorrow is in the hands of God Tomorrow will be a lovely day.

You don't know for certain about God until you're dead.

There is no escape now. For anyone.' 'Be patient. The sun has not yet set.' 'I have no confidence in this sun, Mariko-san.' He reached out and touched her face. 'Gomen nasai.

I didn't know what was going on, didn't understand a bit of it, didn't like any of it. Maybe that's why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won't work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.

Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced Cherchez la femme that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and female adults. My fear derived from my apocalyptic fantasy apparatus. I knew that all things went chaotically bad. My empirical training in chaos was unassailably valid.

The fatality rate is 100%. But then things get very weird.

I want to see you tomorrow, but I don't know what this thing with my parents is going to be like. When you go to lunch, sit so you can see into the Men's section. If my back is turned, I can't meet you. If I'm facing you, I can meet you and the number of plates on my tray is the time I'll be here. What if you can't come till midnight? Then I'm going to look like a fucking idiot.

Hope is an illusion a dangling carrot something to keep us going but going towards what