Quotes About Uncertainty

They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.

The secret of the Witch Doctor's power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not—and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor's philosophy is true.

Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things—this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen...

No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

What kind of 'changing world', Alvah? Changing to what? From what? Who's doing the changing?

They used to rush through here, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape.

En cambio ahora su apresuramiento tiene otro motivo: el miedo. No los empuja ningún propósito, sino tan sólo el miedo. No van a ningún sitio; escapan.

abeyance. "Is there

They rouse themselves mentally only long enough to utter an I wish, and stop there, and wait, as if the rest were up to some unknown power.

As we drove away, I asked Dariush whether it was not a relief that under Khatami, such run-ins happened a couple times a year, instead of every weekend. He gave me a searching look. "However infrequent, I do not find any consolation in the fact that my fate is determined by the whim of an armed sixteen-year-old.

More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess.

The fact is I don't know what I want, and I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I've always been told what is right—and suddenly I don't know anymore. I know what I don't want, but I don't know what I want,' she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

I opened it the way we used to open Hafez, closing our eyes, asking our question and letting our finger rest somewhere at random. It opened to the page in the middle of Burt Norton,' beginning with the lines At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless./ Neither from not toward; at the still point,there the dance/is.

I see a bird like a cock, which means good news, but you yourself are very agitated. A road that looks bright. And you are on the first step. You are thinking of a hundred things at the same time. One road is closed and dark, and the other is open and full of light. Both could happen; it is your choice. There is a key; a problem will be solved. ... A small ship that is still in the harbor and has not yet started to set sail.

Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us...A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it.

the words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms...

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

My head was crammed with too many facts and too few answers.

tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

when what felt like a wide distribution of probable outcomes narrows to the inevitable.