Quotes About Uncertainty

The future ain't what it used to be.

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.

I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.

I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.

Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose.

Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...

Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.

There's never any knowing—how am I to put it?—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. —E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do 'something', that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia.

Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you're not going to want to use it?'The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother's ear: 'I don't know what I'm going to want until when I want it.

begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don't know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don't know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the

It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he'd barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly *because* she'd rather walk than be told what stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go.

The art of mid-life is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier.

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do "something," that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.

Nobody seemed sure if it was the last ferry. We waited. Time passed, the sky turned pink.

Red Lake must be his Rubicon. Either he must enter the unknown to seek, to strive, to find, or turn back and fail and never know and be always haunted.

Peg, are you goin' to throw me down, too?" "Mr. Arthurs! I—I—