Quotes About Uncertainty

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

I'll let you sweat a while. You ain't gonna know when it's comin' or from where. You'll just be walking along or riding somewhere—and bing—that's it.

leaving my past is like jumping of a burning buiding. except jumping is a one way trip. You can't change your mind halfway down

A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. That alone should make him kinder to strangers.

Lo que hoy tiene de particular la incertidumbre es que existe sin la amenaza de un desastre histórico; y en cambio, está integrada en las prácticas cotidianas de un capitalismo vigoroso (…). La consigna "nada a largo plazo" desorienta la acción planificada, disuelve los vínculos de confianza y compromiso y separa la voluntad del comportamiento.

Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

He's next to you, right next to you in fact, so close, or . . . he isn't.

This is the place, you say to yourself, this is the place where everything starts to begin, the wounds reveal a thicker skin and suddenly there is no floor.

We were in the Safeway parking lot. I couldn't find my cigarettes. You said, "Hurry up!" but I was worried there would be a hold-up and we would be stuck in a hostage situation, hiding behind the frozen meats, with nothing to smoke for hours. You said "Don't be silly," so I followed you into the store. We were thumping the melons when I heard somebody say, "Nobody move!" I leaned over and whispered in your ear, "I told you so.

They want to stop but they can't stop. They don't know what they're doing.

and then the question behind every question: What happens next?

You see it as a room, a tabernacle, the dark hotel. You're in the hallway again, and you open the door, and if you're ready you'll see it, but maybe one part of your mind decides that the other parts aren't ready, and then you don't remember where you've been

This time everyone has the best intentions. You have cancer.

There's a thing in my stomach about this. A simple thing. The last rung.

You had expected something else, anything else

Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets murky.

He was not dead yet, not exactly— parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting for something to happen, something grand

We have been very brave, we have wanted to know the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes.

The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

and suddenly darkness, suddenly only darkness.

There's nowhere to go , I thought. There's nowhere to go.