Quotes About Uncertainty

Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we're uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we're good at.

Given the strong odor of imminent failure

Solo hay una cosa que puede dar por segura, señor presidente —me dijo—. Cualquier día, en cualquier momento dado, alguien, en algún lugar, la está cagando.»

War might be hell and still the right thing to do. Economies could collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard all their lives and still lose everything.

At ten, she learned that no address was permanent, at twelve, that no promise was sacred, and at sixteen, that there was no such thing as safe.

You're sure about this?" "No. But I'm doing it anyway. I have to.

To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort.

If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.

La mayoría elegiríamos a un médico que esté dispuesto a investigar si el diagnóstico podría ser el peor posible, en vez de uno que llegue enseguida a la conclusión de que todo está fenomenal.

What do you do when confronted with an inexplicable and alarming situation? Well, you can panic or give in to some other tyrannical emotion, like dread. Or you can escape into a book or a puzzle or, judging from the adults around me, a bottle of gin. But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.

Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the "lonely salesman" once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.

In the end, the guards walked her out to her solitary old blue Pinto sitting in the parking lot, and she drove down the dark canyons to the freeway and the brighter lights of the Valley. She wasn't sure just why the thought of going home alone would frighten her. When she reached it, the place was quiet and normal as ever; but when she finally slept, toward six, it was not restful sleep.

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense? Sure, I said. Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.

But luck is just throwing dice.

The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go.

life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don't rule it out.

so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it.

My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here.

There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.

I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.