Quotes About Uncertainty

past performance is no guarantee of future success.

This is what tension feels like. The tension of being left behind.

The strongest foundation we can find is the realization that there isn't a foundation.

The Two Reasons Seeing the Future Is So Difficult Attachment to an outcome combined with the resistance and fear of change.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Who would fardels bear, To groan and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all;

Doubtful it stood, as two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.

I sometimes do believe, and sometimes do not, as those that fear they hope, and know they fear.

We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be. (Hamlet 5.2.217-224)

I am terrified by the dizzying pleasure of it: I am both here and over there; I am be and I am no longer me! Am I already dead?

He mouthed the words to her that she could not see, and that she could not hear. It was all he dared tonight, strangers in a castle, strangers to this land, their future a great black question mark and an ending he could not foresee. He bent his lips to her ear and said without breathe: Lia-heart. Little dragon. I love you too.

It's funny how your life can come apart in an instant. How you can feel safe and satisfied one moment, and the next you're dangling over an abyss, no warning, no quarter. You're absolutely about to fall.

Whoever wants to know how it's all going to end before it actually does? Only poets and madmen, I would think.

I wonder at how many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely different ways of coping, and we each must cope as best we can.

Perhaps many of them shared my sentiments, but our options then were black and white, between this and that. The grey area of freedom we longed for existed only in dreams.

You are out of your freaking skull! Maybe, but is that relevant?

Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin... She didn't want to give up hope, so she was just going to have to live with the fear.

And happy. I'm not used to these...feelings. It's like a...one of those...horrible carnival rides I've seen, that go up and down and spin and jerk, and, well, usually I'm so...on the ground. I'm not sure I can take it.

Do the other angels know what they are doing? Am I the only confused one? Maybe I am unfinished, an unfinished angel.

But I thought about all the things that had to have spun into place in order for us to be alive and for us to be right there, right then. I thought about the few thing we thought we knew and the billions of things we couldn't know, all spinning, whirling our there somewhere.

I cannot control who was going to come, and who was going to go, and who will stay my buddy, my pal, and who'll find me enchanting, and oddly I feel relieved.

Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice,too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears... or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad. Geoffrey's mouth twitched. God help me, he said, I've sired a lawyer!

What is a thing worth, if it comes with no risk?

Henry nodded, then flinched when the woman began a high, keening wail. I am thankful that we got here in time, he said. I am beholden to God, and two Hugh de Plucknet for not giving up. I know we won a victory here this night. But I am beginning to see, Uncle, that victories in this war are not what they seem. For what have we truly won? The chance to do it all again on the morrow.