Quotes About Uncertainty

In fact, as I get older, I begin to feel that actually what we need more in the world is doubt; more skepticism, less crazed certainty. . . . People who know the answer and are going to impose it on everybody else, I think, are terrifying people.

Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.

Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed

No one can predict which of life's vexations insomnia will favour.

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.

She was not in pain, not yet, but she was retreating before its threat.

She resented the way she was listening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it, dreading it.

he went back upstairs to stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. Who was he? Captain of the second fifteen? An abject housebound halfwit in his pyjamas? He didn't know.

Lo necesito. Tengo cincuenta y nueve años. Es mi último cartucho. Todavía no he visto pruebas de que exista otra vida después de ésta.

Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

There was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis...

One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.

He needed that time edged with boredom in which fantasy could flourish. Though it still surprised her, she was to some extent familiar with the delicacy of masculine pride. Despite a surface assurance, men were easily offended. Their moods could swing wildly. Caught in the turbulence of the unacknowledged emotions, they tended to mask their uncertainty with aggression.

It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this.

She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked.

Somebody handed me two hand grenades," said Seaman Warren G. Harding of the California. "I said: 'What do I do with them?' He said: 'Never mind! Don't pull this!' That's all the instruction I had.

But he also emphasized that they should arrange their personal affairs and write letters to their families, "just in case some of us don't get back.

War Plan Orange seemed to recap the dismal career of the Russian fleet under Admiral Rozhestvensky in 1905, and who could say with confidence that the result would not be the same?

The truth was that no one, not even Admirals Fletcher or Spruance, knew precisely how the battle was unfolding. It was too big, too spread out; too much was happening at once, and what little data could be pieced together may or may not be reliable. They were all feeling their way through the fog of war.

Habbab, who had appeared out of nowhere like someone stripped of his past, would in due course find himself stripped naked on the portals of his future.

Are you sure you know where you're going? Andrea frowned. Would you like me to pull over and ask that bamboo for directions? I don't know, do you think it will answer? We peered at the bamboo. I think it looks suspicious, Andrea said. Maybe there is a heffalump hiding in it. Andrea stared at me. You know, heffalump? From Pooh Bear? Where do you even get this shit?

You're not going to die? Not right this minute. And of course, saying something like that usually resulted in immediate dying. I braced myself for a stray meteorite falling through the roof to crush my skull.

Hi, Your Majesty, we drugged your love muffin and then let her walk out into the dark, in the snow. Her apartment is destroyed and we're not sure where she is...

Someone pounded on the office door. Barabas moved to the door, slid aside the metal shutter covering the narrow spy window, and looked through it."It's your lover man." "Barabas, open the damn door," Raphael snarled. Barabas slid the shutter closed. "Do you want me to let him in?" "I'm thinking about it." Barabas slid the shutter open. "She's thinking about it.