Quotes About Uncertainty

It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard.

Sometimes there was a simultaneous quiet upstairs and down, like a blanket of snow, as if at that moment no one anywhere in the galaxy knew what to say.

I cannot see life, what it's supposed to be: I'm stumped and mystified and frozen in place. Yet other times, I realize, regardless, there's a lot to be thankful for. It's perplexing! How's a soul to know?

I was realising that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.

Wonder about mistress courses, certification, resumes. Perhaps you are not really qualified.

Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything. The lid off the mayonnaise, Uncle Ron's honey wine four years in the left corner. Broccoli yellowing, flowering fast. They are all metaphors. They are all problems.

Precancer?' she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. 'Isn't that... like life?

I try. What can I say?" She pauses. "Is all this really happening? I keep thinking that soon it will be over—the life expectancy of a cloud is supposed to be only twelve hours—and then I realize something has occurred that can never ever be over.

I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. It seems old, with too much makeup. I feel stuck, out of school, working odd jobs, like someone brooding, hat in hand in an anteroom, waiting for the future as if it were some hoop-skirted belle that must gather up its petticoats, float forward, and present itself to me.

Thoughts of leaving will move in, bivouac throughout the living room; they will have eyes like rodents and peer out at you from under the sofa, in the dark, from under the sink, luminous glass beads positioned in twos.

His fish smells fishier than the others- he is sure of it. Perhaps he has been poisoned.

Always in motion is the future," Yoda reminded himself. "Know this you do. Heed your own lessons you should.

Here was the thing about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you'd been traveling; you could never say how long it would be.

He knew too much to be an optimist, and not enough to relieve his pessimism.

If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken.

There is nothing more dangerous than a woman with a shotgun. Because you don't know when it's going to go off...and neither does she.

Never can tell when you might come on somebody needs skinning.

it is better to eat when one can, for one never knows when he will eat again.

If at any time your Prince should pretend your position with him is sure, begin from that moment to feel unsure.

Keep an open mind," he told me, "for no man can say what can or cannot be, nor can he say what does or does not exist.

They were waiting for his death. No

There is no safety anywhere,' he said quietly, 'but you do not seem a man who is used to safety. Ride well.

I know. But now I don't