Quotes About Uncertainty

This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven't happened. And often things aren't what they seem.

Beginnings are always like this. One minute everything exists, the next minute everything is lost.

But things never go the way you want them to, and this was no exception. The world seemed to have a better sense of how you wanted things not to go.

Not to excuse myself, but when you have people right in front of you denying your very presence like that, then see if you don't doubt whether you actually exist. I look at my hands half expecting to see clear through them.

The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space with no idea where I'm going.

And she leaves. She opens the door and, without a backward glance, goes out and shuts the door. I stand at the window and watch her go. She vanishes in the shadow of a building. Hands resting on the sill, I gaze for the longest time at where she disappeared. Maybe she forgot something she wanted to say and will come back. But she never does. All that's left is an absence that's like a hollow space.

For a while is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting. And probably is a word whose weight is incalculable.

The past and the present, might we say, go like this . The future is a maybe . Yet we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us fair, we only come up with another indefinite maybe . The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.

Perhaps nothing can be certain in this world, I said. But at least we can believe in something.

I'm completely empty. Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like an unlived-in house. An unlocked unlived-in house. Anybody can come in, any time they want. That's what scares me the most.

When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.

Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?

After all, what does the stock market sell us if not the unfounded hope of a rosy future?

things never work out like you think they will, but that's what makes life interesting

I try imagining myself in forty years, but it's like trying to picture what lies beyond the universe.

When it came down to it, though, could anything be completely correct, or completely incorrect? We lived in a world where rain might fall thirty percent, or seventy percent, of the time. Truth was probably no different. There could be thirty percent or seventy percent truth.

I had to put my faith in time.

On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.

I forced words out: There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared , I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.

For me, it was a lonely season. Whenever I got home and took off my clothes, I felt as if any second my bones would burst through my skin. Like some unknown force inside me had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and was leading me off in some strange direction to another world

As you may know, in this Town, memory is unreliable and uncertain. There are things we can remember and things we cannot remember.

At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn't yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.

about life after divorce. Like you're walking along as always, sure you're on the right path, when the path suddenly vanishes, and you're facing an empty space, no sense of direction, no clue where to go, and you just keep trudging along. That's what it feels like.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you've had it: things'll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.