Quotes About Uncertainty

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

Better for real things to be uncontrollable, better for one's life to be undecipherable and intellectually impenetrable than to attempt to make casual sense of what is unknown with a fantasy that is mad. Better, I thought, that the events of these past three days should remain incomprehensible to me forever than to posit, as I had just been doing, a conspiracy of foreign intelligence agents who are determined to control my mind. We've all heard that one before.

What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened.

War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night

Son, anything can happen to anyone, my father told me, but it usually doesn't.

Ciò che noi sappiamo è che, in un modo non stereotipato, nessuno sa nulla. Non puoi sapere nulla. Le cose che sai... non le sai. Intenzioni? Motivi? Conseguenze? Significati? Tutto ciò che non sappiamo è stupefacente. Ancor più stupefacente è quello che crediamo di sapere.

But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that--well, lucky you.

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

Ma appena desideri appassionatamente una cosa sulla quale non puoi esercitare alcun controllo, sei alla vigilia di una grossa delusione: ti stai preparando a farti mettere in ginocchio.

Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult—not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty—nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others. "Did you meet Mr. von Ribbentrop?" Now almost girlishly bashful, she replied, "I danced with Mr. von Ribbentrop." "Where?

Lo malo de la vida es que no sabes realmente si es un proceso descendente, no sabes en absoluto de qué se trata.

Writing isn't hard work, it's a nightmare. Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare. . . There's a tremendous uncertainty that's built into the profession, a sustained level of doubt that supports you in some way. A good doctor isn't in a battle with his work. In most professions there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. With writing, it's always beginning again.

Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

So basically they're just standing around, as people will, their luggage a vivid jumble at their feet, kind of bogged down, tired, with that so-near-and-yet type of tension, a sense of somewhere definite they must be at by a definite time, but no clear consensus on how to get there. Since they're late. As Dr. Ambrose might venture to observe, they're figuratively unsure about where to go from here .

Mark has been more comfortable with the general drift of a conversation before, lots of times. What if the stories that really stab him are really other people's stories? What if they're bullshit? What if he alone isn't clued into this, and there's no way to know ?

Life is not so simple. There are many futures. The life of a single person is like a great tree: every branch, every twig, every leaf is a possible future.

True. The one certainty about riding, Braygan, is that - at some time - you will fall off. It is a fact. Another fact you might like to consider, in your life of perpetual terror, is that you will die. We are all going to die, some of us young, some of us old, some of us in our sleep, some of us screaming in agony. We cannot stop it, we can only delay it.

Our lives are spent sailing in the mist, hoping for a burst of sunlight that can make sense of who we are.

Our souls are but leaves in a storm, and only the gods know where we will come to rest.

The world was changing, and he was running out of places to hide.

The terrible thing about death is that you don't know you've died. —Or is that the terrible thing? Maybe that's the blessing.

Questions, all the questions, everything was a question and there were so few answers.

Humans haven't been on Hella long enough. We can vaccinate ourselves against the things we know are out there and all the things we think are out there, but we can't protect ourselves against all the things that might be out there that we don't know.