Quotes About Uncertainty

You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.

There was the same old dread, and there was the same old hope

If we see everything as uncertain, then their I value fades away.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, fro we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.

And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance. Love or simple obsession?

Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.

Chi pronuncia parole d'amore è come chi lancia un messaggio in codice con una trasmittente difettosa, senza mai essere sicuro di cosa viene captato (e, ciò nonostante, come un dente di leone che libera infinite spore delle quali una minima parte si riproduce, quel fortuito, ottimistico tentativo di telecomunicazione va compiuto - fiducia nel servizio postale).

Alas, Madame Straus, there are no certainties, even grammatical ones.… [O]nly that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered

There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability.

He asks her to marry him because it feels like an extremely dangerous thing to do: if the marriage were to fail, it would ruin both their lives.

There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a life formed on the basis of probability.

we are collectively unsure of what the point of private wealth really

The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.

But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.

3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one's movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?

Once upon a time I had my life planned out...