Quotes About Uncertainty

fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

What is your story sir? I said. That is the dilemma, he replied. I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.

When the children of Israel left Egypt, they were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. For them, this did not seem to be a problem. For me, it was an enormous problem. The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn't understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts

What if?' has no power against 'What if not?' The not of you is unbearable. I must have you.

Miss Pinch came visiting, and asked me what I intended to do with my Future. She spoke about it as though it were an incurable disease.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

The curious are always in some danger.

we have to know what we are doing, pretending an order that doesn't exist, to make a security that cannot exist.

The future is not fixed unless we allow it to be so.

This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will forever be recognizing people we have never met. But darkness and death are not the same. One is temporary, the other is not.

The trouble with books is that you don't know what's in them 'till is too late

We're going to wake up one morning and the world won't be the same. That morning could be any morning, I say. It could be climate breakdown. It could be nuclear. It could be Trump or Bolsonaro. It could be The Handmaid's Tale.

Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

I love you, he says. I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life. I want to trust him. I don't trust him.

Uncertainty to me was like Aardvaark to other people. A curious thing I had no notion of, but recongnised through secondhand illustrations.

We gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us

The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe – no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble.

Congratulations on your Engagement'. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted.

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

If I rush at this relationship it's because I fear for it. I fear you have a door I cannot see and that any minute now the door will open and you'll be gone. Then what? (...) You said, 'I'm going to leave.' I thought, Yes, of course you are, you're going back to your shell. I am an idiot. I've done it again and I said I'd never do it again.

Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.

To write a love letter, you have to start, without knowing, what you want to say, and end, without knowing what you have said.

I try to remind myself that we are never promised anything, and that what control we can exert is not over the events that befall us but how we address ourselves to them.

But that was what made things so exciting--nothing was ever how you expected it to be.