Quotes About Uncertainty

If I'd been older I would've asked what it was right away, but I didn't because I wanted to postpone the moment when I would know what it was. In stories I'd read, I'd come across the words nameless dread. They'd just been words then, but now that's exactly what I felt.

Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.

Which way will the cat jump?

Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

The world was no longer solid and dependable, it was porous and deceptive. Anything could disappear. At the same time, everything I looked at was very clear. It was like one of those surrealist paintings we'd studied in school the year before. Melted clocks in the desert, solid but unreal.

It's the unbroken calm, both within and without, that is getting to her. Real events happen to people, she thinks, why not me? And then there's her conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her.

We should not expect too much from faith," he said. "Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion.

He doesn't know what is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him it he looks at it too clearly.

It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen.

What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog's, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There's no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing, anyway? You can't have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term.

How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it's this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people

Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling or the absence of it.

But it's difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity.

It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution.

He can't shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there's no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he's ungrateful by nature.

As a species we're doomed by hope, then?

I'm such a mess," he says. "Sometimes I think everyone's dead.

She sees where she is, she's here, by herself, she's stranded in the future. She doesn't know how to get back.

I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as used to be said; though in present day, the idea of God laughing is next door to blasphemy. An ultra-serious fellow, God is now.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to." ? Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin