Quotes About Uncertainty

I'd rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I'm not saying I'm choosing failure. I mean, one doesn't choose failure, does one? I know what I don't want, but not what I do want.

One day he had meant everything to her, he represented her future, and the next, he meant nothing.

The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.

I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself. That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn't know it.

It seems to me,' said Philippa prosaically, 'that on the whole we run more risks with Mr Crawford's protection than without it.

One knows, when all one's life one has walked in dangerous places, when the silence is that of ambush and when the silence is that of emptiness.

I am too far away now from it all,' Lymond said. 'And if we are going to be metaphysical, I have no sea card, or compass, or star.

I should hesitate to attribute anything to him at the moment, even principles,' said Lord Culter, smiling. 'But you are free to try.

Our powder and arrows are going to run out on us some time. And so are our food and water and joie de vivre and good books and everything. Why not walk out now and get made into somebody's favourite slave?

It was hard to say therefore why he did not go below, and rally his brother, and encourage him to let the past fade, and look forward to what lay before him. Unless, in his heart of hearts he recognized as Lymond did that what lay around him were shut gates; and what lay before him was nothing.

The door opened. 'Hercules?' said Danny tremulously. 'Isosceles? The Triangle? The Angel Apostate?

He knew what would happen. He has laid wagers with himself, I imagine, for days: how many hours, how many miles towards safety before he has to drop out.

Archie shrugged. 'All I know is what's going to happen.' Philippa said, 'What should I do?' And Archie said, 'Break him.

As if nothing had happened.' 'Well. Nobody knows.

There he goes. What do you think he will do?' 'What you want him to do,' Adam said dryly. 'Doesn't he always?' 'No,' Lymond said.

The door shut behind them all, and locked. The women stared at it, mesmerized, and observed across it the wavering shadow of an uncanny cloud. Behind the chamfered windows the sun was obscured by drifting wreaths of grey smoke, and the silence filled with the crackling of flames. The youngest surviving Crawford, in leaving, had deftly set fire to the castle.

Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know .

his thoughts revolving silently in this squirrel-cage of mystification.

You had decided to take the action, whatever it was."   "Yes."   "Yes. It involved perhaps a period of inaction."   "Of comparative inaction—yes."   "Of suspense, shall we say?"   "Yes—of suspense, certainly."   "Possibly

I say, Parker, these are funny cases, ain't they? Every line of inquiry seems to peter out. It's awfully exciting up to a point, you know, and then nothing comes of it. It's like rivers getting lost in the sand.

In any case,' I added, 'I don't know that the great-niece is excluded under the Act—I only understand that she may be. In any case, there are still six months before the Act comes into force, and many things may happen before then.' " 'You mean that Auntie may die,' she said, 'but she's

They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good.

I don't know, she said. We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.

Please don't let me hope, dear God. Please don't. I