Quotes About Uncertainty

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

I promised myself that I would maintain momentum. Maintain momentum was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown. In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it. In fact I had no idea what it was.

I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing.

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.

Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.

I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.

It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting.

I put the word diagnosis in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a diagnosis led to a cure, or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the blessing aspect. We omit the instant of sudden chill, the what-if, the free fall into certain failure. What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me? And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?

It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?

Uno no teme por lo que ha perdido. Lo que ha perdido ya está en el muro. Lo que ha perdido ya está al otro lado de las puertas cerradas. Uno teme por lo que todavía no ha perdido. Puede que ustedes todavía no vean nada por perder. Y, sin embargo, no hay día en su vida en que yo no la vea.

Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?