Quotes About Uncertainty

A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.

It was hard to tell whether things were deteriorating or whether it was just the usual baseline of craziness, made more vivid by the fact that they'd all hunkered down in a fortress to await the collapse of civilization.

we are only human, a condition of perpetual uncertainty and failure.

If a blind, three-legged racehorse named "Next Stop: Glue Factory" were racing down at the Fort Erie track, you can bet Lex Galbraith would've bet his life savings on the nose of that nag.

However bad things seem to be, they can always get worse!

Hicke hade tagit liknande språng i hela sitt liv, språng undan faror, språng ut i det okända, språng utan skyddsnät. Hicke hade alltid litat på turen och på förvissningen om att världen i grund och botten var vänligt inställd till honom (s. 224, 226).

I've been wondering lately whether fear is necessary for survival, whether it sharpens the senses during storms of uncertainity. Or is it, as I suspect, merely another variant of weakness?

I understood how easily and how quickly things could be snatched away.

I couldn't swallow. It had to be wrong. We had to be able to rewind. It couldn't be real. It felt so weightless. It felt like an idea, a particle of dust floating around in the air that hadn't landed yet.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.

Plus, it made me nervous, because was this the time in my own life before I found someone to love and had a family and looked back longingly on my youthful freedom? Or was it the beginning of what my life would be like forever?

I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea- I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I'd actually go.

I will not be the one it happens to - this is what we all believe, what we must believe to make our way in the world each day. Someone else. Not me. But every once in a while it is you, or someone close enough that it might as well be you. People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what's meant to be will be; the rest of us know better.

In situations that make you nervous, do your best and proceed; others before you have also been nervous.

Sure, I believed the worst of myself but - not really. I was always waiting to be proven wrong.

The life of a soldier seemed like a climb up a stairway without any stairs, only the wooden supporting spine of preagreed ritual. Step away from that spine and anything might happen -- to you, by you.

She felt lost, adrift in a sea of uncertainty, alone on a ship that she didn't know how to sail, knowing only that there were no charts, and no land in sight.

It took another time, more waves rolling up, to understand that he had no idea what it would be like to live without fear at his elbow, warning him, keeping him safe, keeping him frightened.

He was wrong, somehow, and he wanted to be all right, but it was almost as if there was some secret nobody would tell him, so he was always going to be stuck outside.

She was too often too close to off balance, she knew that.

Griff had the guarded face of a man who had much to lose by the wrong choice, although he had never had anything to lose. Griff's smile visited his face like a stranger who was only asking directions on his way through to another town.

If they were afloat on the sea, and blind in the fog — they didn't even know what direction they should turn in. What then did it matter that she knew reading and writing, or that he had been caught out in a plot against his overlord?

there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.