"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity."
— Gilda Radner

"And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.'"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

".... have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and... try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.... Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know."
— Marsilio Ficino (Letters of Marsilio Ficino: Volume 3)

"They were close enough that he could feel the hurried beat of her heart. He could feel Charlotte's indecision in every word she didn't say and every move she didn't make. She was tense with uncertainty, quivering with irresolution. She might not be leaning into him, but she wasn't pulling away, either."
— Lauren Willig (The Temptation of the Night Jasmine)

"Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)"
— Blaise Pascal (Pascal's Pensees)

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."
— Alice Hoffman

"No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you."
— Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale)

"The uncertainty of certain feelings is the best way to break them."
— Yannick Heywang

"He fell silent. For several moments they all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said, "All right, we're back together again. What the hell do we do next?""
— Stephen King (The Dark Tower)

"Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences."
— Bertrand Russell (The Problems of Philosophy)

"Whenever conscience speaks with a divided uncertain and disputed voice, it is not the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear, undivided voice, a voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light, and serenity"
— Henri F. Amiel

"Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next."
— Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories)

"It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse. "
— William P. Young (The Shack)

"Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted."
— Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases)

"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)