Quotes About Uncertainty

I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward. (in The Man With the Golden Typewriter).

I love a question I can't answer. It keeps things interesting, even after so many years.

Life is what happens, Magnus, no matter what you expect or want.

Informants can be helpful, but they are never infallible. All tools can break, or be turned into weapons.

Good," said Creed. "I always like it when a captain has a plan; makes getting killed a lot less random.

No matter how canny you think you are, something can come along, bam, and put you on your prat.

there was no answer he knew, until he actually faced death.

A hunt leader could not show fear, or let it linger in his stomach, for others would sense it soon enough, taste that fear and become possessed by it. They would hesitate when an order was given, and uncertainty would claim their life as readily as the blade of the enemy.

Of course we'll be there." After Amos left, Ghuda shook his head. In a sour tone he muttered, "Why are we going to Crydee, Ghuda? I haven't the vaguest idea, Ghuda. Shall we go find Nakor, Ghuda? Certainly, Ghuda. Then shall we strangle him, Ghuda?" With a single nod of his head, he answered himself, "With great delight, Ghuda.

The woods were now something fashioned from hopeless dreams, vaulted dark trees so close together their twisted branches seemed woven brown lines inscribed on a black tent, a batik canopy of woeful aspect raised high over- head. There was a sense of ages here; Sean glanced fearfully from side to side, as if something might leap out at him at any turn. The trees

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.

Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.

People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.

Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

you don't have the memory of your future; {that}the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark.

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than doom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.