Quotes About Uncertainty

The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life. She and her husband had moved this past fall to a golfing community outside of Tucson. (Peter was passionate about golf. Willa didn't even know how to play.) She had had to leave behind an ESL teaching job that she loved, and she was hoping to find another one, but she hadn't exactly looked into that yet. She seemed to be sort of paralyzed

The trouble with dying is you don't get to see how everything turns out. You don't know the ending.

The trouble with dying is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending.

She didn't even know if she liked them, in fact, and perhaps she didn't like them, but by now it hardly mattered because how would she ever start over with somebody new, at this point?

she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain.

You know we can't depend on Denny in any permanent way, Amanda told Nora, for instance. He might promise us the moon, but one day he'll up and leave us. I'm surprised he's lasted that long.

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it's almost certain nobody's ever asked him. On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in.

For once, the tears wouldn't come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.

She began to have a slight feeling of panic. What am I doing here? she thought.

The trouble with dying," she'd told Jeannie once, "is that you don't get to see how everything turns out. You won't know the ending." "But, Mom, there is no ending," Jeannie said. "Well, I know that," Abby said. In theory.

I have since wondered, of course, how my life would have been different if I'd decided to stay home that morning. This is what's called the enigma of history, and it can drive you out of your mind if you let it.

The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die--it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

Anything can happen, and anything does;

When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path...there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.

My whole life, I always thought that I was the only impostor. That everyone else was certain they were real in some way that I could never understand. But what if they're all just faking too? Maybe none of us know who we really are.

MOST THINGS DON'T HAPPEN

Maybe none of us know who we really are.

I knew what she was asking, of course. I'd been asking it myself a moment before. But I wasn't sure how you went from dreams to reality without the magic leaking out - or becoming too wild and powerful.

The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.

If any of us die tonight, it won't be from cold or suffocation—it'll be from hitting the ground too fast. Have I mentioned we aren't wearing parachutes?

But we lost so much in the Prettytime - all the foundations were gone. So we're stuck making it up as we go along! Tally laughed. So what else is new, Frizz? Life doesn't come with an instruction manual. So don't tell me that humanity being logic-missing is my fault.

If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.

There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.