Quotes About Uncertainty

What's domesticity? Breakfast in bed? The cuckold going to shoot his wife? Does one inevitably lead to the other? I'm asking because there are no rules anymore and I don't want to end up fucked up. I don't want to destroy anyone through my love. But I don't want to end up chasing intimacy from strangers either.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn't; every time I think somebody doesn't like me, she does. This has never changed and I'm certain it never will.

Even the invisible are insecure. It's the most universal problem we have. It's so universal, it might not even count as a problem.

We're starting to behave as if we've reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

Every time period that's ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism 'May you live in interesting times' did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.

everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.

Life is fucking confusing. I don't know anything, and neither do you.

he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.

a phone without an answering machine would ring incessantly until the caller gave up. You had to answer the phone in order to stop the phone. But the main reason everyone always answered the telephone was the impossibility of knowing who was on the line. Every ringing phone was, potentially, a life-altering event. It might be a telemarketer, but it also might be a death in the family. It could be your next-door neighbor, but it could also be the governor, and there was only one way to find out.

but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

Y2K was the maturation of a criticism whose echo would become normative and unyielding: We've lost control of what we have built, and we need to go back. But the road at our heels was already gone. Forward was the only way out.

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

The future is always impossible.

If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

Well, that's how it always seems, until it doesn't.

even the groups who took advantage of the gold rush were dubious about what was happening.

I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.