Quotes About Uncertainty

She hated this feeling, the sensation of trying and failing to get her arms around something big. The way political opinions seemed always to be expressed with a total sureness of tone. The way that sureness was at odds with every true thought she'd ever had.

Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand as yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would either be soothed or disappointed, or both.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs

Each might have been a week except for night's failure to come and close the deal. When

Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you.

The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.

Then again, the story does involve a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you, or practically anybody. As he said to me once, who's not missing?

It's just that I'm fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don't see how it's going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.

because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.

I wasn't having second thoughts, but I was having thoughts.

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.

We stopped laughing, I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: Do you like me?

I'd lost count of the disappointments.

I regret how much I believed in the future.

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.

Can't you even tell me if I'm on the right track? Buckminster purred, and Dad shrugged his shoulders again. But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right? He circled something in an article and said, Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door. Waiting for someone? Yankel asked. What color is this? He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red. Yes, it is red, isn't it? Seems so. She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?

I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.

He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either, but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is.

I knew that we were sharing something with our eyes, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know if it mattered.

My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.