Quotes About Uncertainty

Tell me," I said, "how do you know that your father is not right about my poisons? How do you know I will not drug you where you sit?" "I do not." "Yet you would dare to stay?" "I dare anything," he said. And that is how we came to be lovers.

My chest trilled with something I could not quite name. Escape, and danger, and hope all at once.

I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath.

I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I'm afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

We cannot say. We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.

He had only one life. That was a basic and relentless fact. An eternity of 'something or other' lay behind him, and an equally obscure eternity of 'something or other' lay in front of him.

History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar.

Would you rather I found you a place of your own right away?" "It doesn't matter." "Which would you rather do?" The effort of decision brought her out of her torpor. She made fists and her lips tightened. "I guess I have to be with you.

For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty.

I just don't know. Maybe I'm good, but that goddamn scale would hesitate a long time before tilting that way.

We are all at the mercy of the hostility

He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things. —GEORGE SAVILE, MARQUIS OF HALIFAX

and you wondered if you'd be alive next time Halley's Comet came round

Death in itself is nothing; but we fear. To be we know not what, we know not where.

When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit, Trust on and think to-morrow will repay; To-morrow's falser than the former day.

Most men wait to move until victory is guaranteed.

A woman who is striving invites others to strive. The message—sometimes implicit in her actions, sometimes explicit through her words—is, "Get your act together. Life is uncertain. There is no time for your heart here. Shape up. Get busy. That's what is important." She does not say, "All is well. All shall be well." Her fear doesn't allow it. She is withholding the very things her world needs.

Most people don't even try to learn the ways of the kingdom; they just go about their days with a practical agnosticism, hoping things work out, tossing up prayers like they hope to score on a Jesus lottery ticket.

The intellectual support for UNBELIEF is about as stable as the stock market.

Yet this is the world God has made—a world that requires us to live with risk. Because God wants us to live by faith.

The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

Just because we cannot see clearly te end of the road, that is no reason for not setting out on the essential journey.