Quotes About Uncertainty

knows where he is now. Not here, that's for sure. Hope the Krauts didn't grab him. Buford…Dammit!

You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There's no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair.

Which one I like better?" "That's the question, Mr. Tour Guide." I felt suddenly awkward, like I was being tested on something I hadn't studied for. I didn't really know which one I liked more. The only photos I looked at regularly were surveillance and crime scene shots. Aesthetics didn't count. Finally

Okay," Simpson said. "You got

Loving was playing a Bayesian game now, one modeled on imperfect information.

but he still wasn't sure how to respond to the English obsession with the weather.

No escape plan can ever be foolproof,' interjected the brigadier. 'In the end, it all comes down to how you cope with the unforeseen.

to be in the middle distance, and he was not perceptibly

I don't know," sighed

I made only one real friend while I 'loitered' around the dockyard. His name was Old Jack Tar. Mr Tar lived in an abandoned railway carriage at the end of the sheds. Uncle Stan told me to keep away from Old Jack because he was a stupid, dirty old tramp. He didn't look that dirty to me, certainly not as dirty as Stan, and it wasn't long before I discovered he wasn't stupid either

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

You went out with a girl at first because the sheer sight of her made you weak in the knees. You fell in love and were desperate not to let her get away. And yet the more you thought about her, the less you knew who she was. The hope was that love transcended all differences. That was the hope.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.

I never know what I feel until it's too late.

If they were going to kill you, would they knock?

It seemed especially cruel, then, three days later, in the hospital when the doctor came into the room to tell Leonard that he suffered from something that would never go away, something that could only be managed, as if managing, for an eighteen-year-old looking out on life, could be any life at all.

After four years at college, nobody was anybody she knew.

Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people—and especially doctors—had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. Not even a gleam in my father's eye yet (he was staring gloomily at the thermometer case in his lap). Now my mother gets up from the so-called love seat. She heads for the stairway, holding a hand to her forehead, and the likelihood of my ever coming to be seems more and more remote.

But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over backyard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists' offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.

English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.

Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.