Quotes About Uncertainty

Tonight the guns have been banging away so much that I've already had to gather up my belongings four times. Today I packed a suitcase with the stuff I'd need in case we had to flee, but as Mother correctly noted, 'Where would you go?

He talked about the jews. He would've found it much easier if he'd been a christian and if he could be one after the war. I asked if he wanted to be baptized, but that wasn't the case either. Who was to know whether he was a jew when the war was over? he said.

November 8th, 1943 At night in bed I see myself alone in a dungeon, without Father and Mother. Or I'm roaming the streets, or the Annex is on fire, or they come in the middle of the night to take us away and I crawl under my bed in desperation. I see everything as if it were actually taking place. And to think it might all happen soon! (**good metaphor use later on for English)

The house shook and the bombs kept falling. I was clutching my "escape bag," more because I wanted to have something to hold on to than because I wanted to run away.

Expectation and hope generate tension, as does fear.

Now that we've been in hiding for a little over a year, you know a great deal about our lives. Still, I can't possibly tell you everything, since it's all so different compared to ordinary times and ordinary people.

Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl

I don't dare do anything anymore, cause Tm afraid it's not allowed.

You know your fear is both false and illogical, but you fear it anyway.

If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

Certainty is missing the point entirely.

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.

I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.

My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don't know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.

I love Wendell Berry's lines that "it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

She lived in fear of ifonic endings. (91)

it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

When you are on the knife's edge—when nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worse—you take in today.

Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all my best skills, intentions, and good ideas.

To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.

Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

Getting found almost always means being lost for a while