Quotes About Uncertainty

Besides, nothing mattered to her any longer. If she had anything left it was her horror of cold — and the uncle had coal through his contacts. But she found the atmosphere of Berlin hard to bear. She dreamed of escape, of going to live under some more clement sky, far, very far away from it all, closer to nature.

Who worries for dying? If I close my eyes tonight, I will either dream, or not, or my eyes will open and I will be here again. And if none of those happen, and I do not wake? Who worries for dying?

One who sits between two chairs may easily fall down.

You replace all my doubts... with others.

We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.

I guess I knowed I was taking my life in my hands when I got in that car, 'cause it was a cold day in January, but I was sweatin like a hog in August.

I have no roots anywhere else. I have no 'at home' but here. And I feel doomed. Like I'm riding to Hell on a fast horse. I'm not afraid of dying, but I don't want to die alone. I don't want some no one finding me finished off and asking a sheriff, 'Who's that ?

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

If the opposite of certainty is doubt, humility must lie somewhere between the two

The whole game was about confidence, as it always was. Everything was fine—until it wasn't.

But she knew that, despite their best intentions, people reached a point beyond which they could not return but could only hope for a safe landing.

Don't imagine that our world can't collapse: there is nothing inevitable about progress or peace, and the global and national social and political order we inhabit today is no more immune from catastrophe than the pre–World War II order.

painful ambiguities.

I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance.

AUGUST 9 The next morning, I travel north to my Potts reservation home...In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God. ...I pull over and take a photograph of the sign, and keep driving....We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.

What we're living through is either unreal or too real.

It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we'd sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on.

Roderick had never had so much company. And they were glad for somebody new. Glad he stayed behind. They argued with him. Why go back there? Who's waiting for you?

I don't know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don't know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot.

Father Jude frowned into the blond sky. He was well thought of in his parish, calm and good. Things had been going smoothly down in Argus. He'd had a comfortable routine figured out. And now, what an unwelcome complication, in spite of the huge honor, to be afflicted with so many new problems, uncertainties, even doubts. And how terrifying, this feeling of loving someone. Thrilling. Awful.

For a while in my life I'd lived with the certainty that I would be held in love, and now I was sleeping in a parking lot.

some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his won life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down his face.