Quotes About Uncertainty

War is the province of chance. In no sphere of human activity is such a margin to be left for this intruder. It increases the uncertainty of every circumstance, and deranges the course of events.

We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience.

Honey lamb, there are a lot of things in this world I feel insecure about. Religion. Our national economic policies. What color socks to wear with a blue suit. But I've got to tell you that my performance in that hotel room last night isn't one of them.

As she reached for the plates, she wondered if her life could get any weirder. Her life savings had been handed over to a band of South American guerrillas, she had a phony engagement to a famous football player, she was homeless and jobless, and she was making breakfast for Mad Jack Patriot.

As much as we want to keep ourselves safe, we can't protect ourselves from everything. If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos.

Nunca sabía cuál sería la próxima ocurrencia de su esposa. Lo hacía sentirse como el niño que nunca había sido. ¿Qué haría cuando ella se fuera? Se negaba a pensar en ello. Lo superaría y punto, tal como había hecho con todo lo demás. La vida lo había convertido en un solitario, y era así como le gustaba vivir.

I finally figured out that not every crisis can be managed. As much as we want to keep ourselves safe, we can't protect ourselves from everything. If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos.

Life doesn't always go according to plan. Sometimes heading in a new direction can be scary until you realize you're headed toward a new and exciting destination.

Then she looked again, and she wasn't so sure; in fact, she hadn't at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

I think you mustn't wonder that. At least not yet. Perhaps never.

Where there's life, there's hope," I said. Hope. How I'd needed it, in those dark days when it seemed that Papa would never be found, dead or alive. I thought of Alexander again. "Thank you," I whispered.

If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are among the living, but can you be certain?

That night (as on all nights), when the lights get turned out, Don and I lie on our backs side by side with his left hand cradling my right. "I worry that this sickness is taking over your life, Bear," I murmur in the dark now permeated by a bathroom nightlight he has just affixed. "I have no other life," he responds while gently stroking my fingers. "I don't know what to hope for," I whisper. "Let's hope for a good summer," he says.

I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everthing. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest.

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

What's life without risk," my father said. "Nothing but mauvais foi [bad faith]

autumn of 1918, I had just started fifth grade when signs began popping up in windows and on doors, on broadsheets plastered on streetlamps around the neighborhood. Suddenly big public gatherings were being discouraged; taverns, moving-picture houses, soda fountains—even churches—grew empty. Nobody knew what it was exactly, except that it started quickly, with a cough and a fever.

How did you know?' she asked as he sat her on her feet inside the door. 'I didn't. This was just in case.' he lied, this man who'd had women pursuing him since his adolescence…

Sometimes she wasn't even sure she existed and could not have said what her truest feelings were, or indeed where she ended or began. The girl felt she had no proper shape, no sides as it were, and she dreamed of being more fixed, more clever, of winning the admiration of brilliant unknown people. In the future, when she grew up, her life would be as beautiful as a book, peopled by interesting and fascinating things, sweeter than music or love. -- Susan Johnson, The Broken Book

I don't care about this stuff. I'm not even sure I'm a girl. I'm an eye in the sky. I am detached. I'm an idiot.

Suspicion, like bread, rises rapidly in a warm environment.

It's funny how life can change so suddenly when you're least expecting it.

Sometimes he felt like two people inside the same skin, and he wasn't always entirely sure which of them was real.

It's about risking everything. Putting your heart on the line, even when you don't know what's going to happen. It's risking having the person you love rip it out and stomp all over it in public.