Quotes About Uncertainty

What did anything mean? he wondered. And how did a person tell? We can never be certain. Not until our dying day. And maybe not even then. All of us, he thought, are down here fumbling around, guessing and calculating. Doing the best we can.

maybe I have got to the point when I see something in everything, because I want to see something. The next thing, he thought, is voices. I'll start hearing voices. What can I count on? What can I believe?

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.

Mors certa, vita incerta

Just tell me why; why the fucking why? To which the universe would hollowly respond, My ways cannot be known, oh man. Which is to say, My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.

Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don't know.

In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

We're blind moles. Creeping through the soil, feeling with our snoots. We know nothing. I perceived this . . . now I don't know where to go. Screech with fear, only. Run away.

What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it's alive.

If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho...even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back.

My father told me what it used to feel like, waiting in the dentist's office. Every time the nurse opened the door you thought, It's happening. The thing I've been afraid of all my life.

Kevin is right about his cat. It's all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can't answer Kevin: 'Why did my cat die?' Answer: 'Damned if I know.' There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We're all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw.

Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I've undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn't new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.

It is over, isn't it?" Trustingly, he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they didn't become real, not until she agreed. "It's over," she said.

How long that part of the cycle had lasted he did not now know; nothing had happened, generally, so it had been measureless.

Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.

he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.

And who am I? The wrong person; I can tell you that.