Quotes About Uncertainty

I used to think heroes were brave and strong but the last look on Robyn's fave was not brave or strong, it was scared and unsure.

Death comes walking across the countryside swinging that scythe, and he might get you or he might not.

the biggest risk is to take no risk. or to take crazy risks.

What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.

Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.

It's strange. With all this harmonious interplay of numbers you would have expected the whole system to be a precisely coherent whole. It isn't. There are echoes here from the scientific view of a world formed by broken symmetry, subject to quantum uncertainty and (so far) defying a precise comprehensive 'theory of everything'. Is this why the 'near miss' is so often more beautiful than perfection?

In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.

he, indeed, who gave fewest pledges to Fortune, has yet suffered her heaviest visitations.

If .. spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.

What I didn't realize was this: It's never possible to be prepared when the future takes over from the past.

Sometimes I think he's as happy as anybody." The words hung in the air a moment without meeting agreement or disagreement: it was as if they both knew secretly that there was no certainty as to what constituted the happiness or unhappiness of another.

Through the window the stones of the graveyard stood out beyond the laurels in the moon, all the dead about, lives as much filled with themselves and their importance once as you this night, indecision and trouble and yearning put down equal with laughing into that area of clay, and they lay calm as you would one eternal night while someone full of problems and uncertainties would lie as awake as you in a room.

People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure.

They didn't take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn't challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn't know how to do anything real. I didn't know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn't just a self-improvement project.

I wanted to know how it was going to turn out, like flipping ahead in a book. I didn't even know what kind of story it was, or what kind of role I was supposed to be playing. Which of us was taking it more seriously? Didn't that have to be me, because I was younger, and also because I was the girl? One the other hand, I thought that there was a way in which I was lighter than he was - that there was a serious heaviness about him that was foreign to me, and that I rejected.

She gazes over at baby Genevieve, who is now asleep in Kevin's arms, and thinks, I really don't have any words of advice at all. The world is an endlessly confounding place.

You can give birth to a beautiful, perfect human being, but requited love isn't guaranteed for her—or for any of us.

You just didn't know what life was going to hand you. You didn't know what love you would find, what love would be snatched away.

I really don't have any words of advice at all . The world is an endlessly confounding place.

She still loves him but she doesn't trust him and she doesn't trust herself, and sometimes she thinks she went back to him only because it was comfortable and familiar

What would being a twenty-one-year-old in 2019 look like? Kirby couldn't begin to imagine.)

but she wasn't sure where. The knee?

her faith has morphed greatly over the years—it has both faltered and deepened. She is more certain now than ever that there is something bigger out there, but she is less sure what it is. God? Allah? Karma?