Quotes About Uncertainty

He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in.

I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps.

He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated.

It had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Juliana in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours after that it was highly probable I had killed her.

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other—for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended—the doors we had indiscreetly opened.

he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.

There was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before, at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life.

I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.

Though I couldn't make out what she was talking of I was terribly frightened; the absence of a clue gave such a range to one's imagination. (Sir Edmund Orme)

It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm doing.

But he's all in a muddle about himself, his position, his power, and indeed about everything in the world. He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in.

But I was to be later on so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my horrid plunge.

The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The

He goes very far, but it's quite possible he doesn't go far enough.

She liked him — she had liked him all the while; now anything might happen! She was ready — she had been ready always, waiting for him to speak. If he had not spoken she would have waited for ever; but when the word came she dropped like the peach from the shaken tree.

In Isabel's mind today there was nothing clear; there was a confusion of regrets, a complication of fears.

the company—that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage.  America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air. I strolled down

In short, the truth of the matter was, Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or, if he wanted any thing

Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand.

Y]ou are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don't think, don't feel, any more than you can help, don't conclude or decide—don't do anything but wait.

I'm afraid I'm too ill." "Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light.

Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it