Quotes About Uncertainty

When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

There are no atheists in the foxholes, I've been told, and precious few agnostics in the Intensive Care ward.

When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions.

Nothing was eternal, except maybe for the mind of God, and even at thirteen I had my doubts about that.

Could she lay hope to rest or did she have to carry it yet awhile longer?

The more you find, the wronger it gets.

It's a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear.

Down the hall I could hear the thud of basketballs, the blare of the time-out horn, and the shouts of the crowd as the sports-beasts fought: Lisbon Greyhounds versus Jay Tigers. Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why?

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a gasp.

Things slowed down for awhile. Sometimes that happens. The pot boils, and then, just before it can boil over, some hand — God, fate, maybe plain coincidence — lowers the heat. I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.

When you're 21, life is a road map. It's only when you get to be 25 or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're 40 are you entirely sure. By the time you're 60, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

We poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

Or maybe it wasn't a man at all.

I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I'd had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

Since you have no choice but to begin in uncertainty, you must learn to tolerate uncertainty and, if possible, to turn it into excitement.

The rightness of things is generally revealed in retrospect, and you're unlikely to know in advance what is right and wrong in a story that has not yet been written.

Because we never know whether our next breath may be our last, being prepared for the immediate unknown becomes as practical as applying for a passport while still uncertain of our destination or time of departure.

We had hoped. It is what we say on the other side, when our vision is shattered and we feel ourselves to be fools for trusting in something we couldn't even see.

When everything looks perfectly right about a person, there's usually something significantly wrong. They were probably in their early thirties, that awkward age when people still believe they matter and that life is going to go their way.

Things were going to get worse before they got better, and everyone knew it.

In a world of change, disruption, chaos, and relentless uncertainty, people crave an anchor point, a set of constructs to give them guidance in the face of turbulence. Covey believed that timeless principles do indeed exist, and that the search for them is not folly, but wisdom.

life is risk. All who inhabit the Earth inhale peril with each breath.

But we will trust you nonetheless. You are bitter, and bitterness is a sign of concern. I trust that.