Quotes About Uncertainty

That could be a good sign, right?" "Sure," I said. It was a terrible sign.

So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we're here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler alert.)

So is this good or bad or what?" "It's 'or what

And if it was this hard with Ratthi and Pin-Lee (Gurathin had never liked me and it was mutual), what was it going to be like with Mensah, if I managed to get that far? I didn't know if I could trust them. I wanted to. But I want a lot of things—freedom, unlimited downloads, new episodes of Drama Sun Islands—most of which I wasn't going to get.

Because change is terrifying. Choices are terrifying. But having a thing in your head that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying.

an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I have a plan." This was true. "I just don't know whether it will actually work or not." This, unfortunately, was also true.

I couldn't pin down what was bothering me. Scan was negative, and this far away from the team there was no ambient sound except the whisper through the air system. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I'd been in worse places with no cameras. Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.

This is Tremaine Valiarde." There was a faint gasp at the other end. "I can't speak long"—family code for someone is listening—"but I needed to let Uncle Galiard know that I'm all right." I need help and I need it now.

It did seem unlikely that the dead human had been a GrayCris agent, because somebody had killed him. As far as I knew, I was the only one currently on the station looking for GrayCris agents to kill. I just realized I don't like the phrase "as far as I knew" because it implies how much you actually don't know. I'm not going to stop using it, but. I don't like it as much anymore.

Moon didn't find any of this very encouraging

It's not aliens, 2.0 said. I knew it wasn't aliens, I told it. It countered, We were seventy-two percent sure if wasn't aliens.

If this went wrong I was going to feel really stupid. The Targets would finally show up and be all "What the hell was it trying to do to itself?

I had options, and I didn't have to decide right away. Which was good, because I still didn't know what I wanted. But maybe I had a place to be while I figured it out.

opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

But then an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

He didn't know what he wanted most, a shower or to get his vaccinations renewed.

Like all good advice, Moon didn't think he was going to have much chance to follow it.

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go.

Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. "Old won't happen to me", you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

The future could go this way, that way. The future's futures have never looked so rocky. Don't put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It's the real stuff, the only stuff, it's all there is, the present, the panting present.

Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.