Quotes About Uncertainty

For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live.

And he could not take the chance of putting his certain ignorance against this man's possible knowledge.

Maybe you've tumbled a world for me. And I don't know what I can build in my world's place.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen.

Then they asked, What'll we do? And the men replied, I don't know. But it was all right. The women knew it was all right, and the watching children knew it was all right. Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love...We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

I don't know whether I can accept things or not, Lee said I've never had a chance to try. I've always found myself with some - not less uncertain but less able to take care of uncertainty. I've had to do my weeping - alone.

I suppose you think I am going to give you one of those 'You are going out into the world' speeches. Well, you are perfectly right. You are going out into the world and it is a mess, a frightened, neurotic, gibbering mess. And there isn't anyone out there to help you because all the people who are already out there are in a worse state than you are, because they have been there longer and a good number of them have given up.

Când te preg?teÈ™ti mult timp pentru o c?l?torie cred c? nutreÈ™ti gândul intim c? nu se va realiza.

Samuel said, "One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now—why, you can't find all the cards.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.

Ever'body's askin' that. 'What we comin' to?' Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way.

One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now—why, you can't find all the cards.

Maybe—maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure—never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?

They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.

You can't make a general rule of it, because sometimes it flops, but mostly a guy that tries to scare you is

Goddam it, whenever a person wants reassurance he tells a friend to think what he wants to be true. It's like asking a waiter what's good tonight.

We can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night.