Quotes About Uncertainty

I didn't know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities wasted.

I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too many places, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don't know where to begin but I want to try.

In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.

that no trumpets could totally drown out the uncertain notes of the boy who doubted his place in the world.

Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice.

For the thoughtful believer, then, there is nothing more certain than the reality of uncertainty, nothing more natural than doubt, which is perhaps thirty seconds younger than faith itself (And even that approximation may be giving faith too much of a headstart).

Our fate is contingent upon which element—that of hope or that of fear—emerges triumphant.

You never can tell what's going to happen to a man until he gets to a place of responsibility

This is really clear to me now. Ever since, I've never felt as tepid of this place as other people do. Everything seems like a long, improbable afterlife.

Not reassuring when weathermen say 'Today will be terrible but don't worry it won't be as terrible as tomorrow or Friday.

Rather than say anything, I stood up and put my foot in the water, testing it. Testing the water, that is, not my foot. Though maybe it was my foot I was testing - whether it could tolerate the water's temperature. Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

but deep down he couldn't tell whether Nigel was joking or not. It was to become an increasingly familiar feeling over the next few years.

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.

Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

It's something to be anxious about, Manley said, if you want to be anxious about something.

Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was. This futility had let's call it a flavor.

The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.

I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex.

Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.

It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn't sure she would.

The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.