Quotes About Uncertainty

In the beginning we feared everything - animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky - everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No one knows why anyone does anything. No one tells the truth. No one is happy. No one is safe.

In the feeble light, it wasn't clear what I was supposed to see.

It was as if I'd found myself in a performance of some extravagant, complex drama, and I didn't have a script.

If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.

Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.

Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is.

Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.

Are you the dart? he said. Are you the knife? The fuse? She said (though he wasn't convinced): My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad...

Just because I have two world records, everyone assumes that means automatically it is two guaranteed gold medals, but it isn't like that, and anything can happen in a race.

Don't write us off. Nobody thought we'd win the World Series in 2005, but we did. There are years when we think we're great, and we're bad. I mean, the funny thing about this game is that you can't figure it out.

My wife had taken off on a plane. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I, of course, like any other person, felt potentially devastated, panicky a little bit.

My world view is that it can all go to hell in an instant, and you have to be ready for it. That's pretty much the central theme running through my work. It's about people's awareness of how uncertain life can be and their trying to guard against that.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.

When my father served in World War II, he wasn't told, 'Go to Europe for four months, for six months, and then you can come back, and there'll be plenty of big bases there for you to serve on, and don't worry about it.'

All of us, we are not one thing: we're always between two worlds, and the idea of not being sure is very appealing to me.

I've never been to the Olympics, so I don't know what to expect. It's better for me, just like my first Worlds... My third Worlds, I knew what it was like, so I was like, 'Oh my goodness. But this is my first Olympics, and not knowing what to expect is good for me.

Sometimes the early bird gets the worm, but sometimes the early bird gets frozen to death.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of 'Mad Men' are good company.

I am always worried when someone says, 'This is perfect.'