ambiguity

It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

I will complain, yet praise;I will bewail, approve:And all my sowre-sweet dayesI will lament, and love.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next.

Heroes don't exist. And if they did, I wouldn't be one of them.

Isn__ life a collection of weird quizzes with no answers to half the questions?

Detective-story writers give this thrill by exploiting the resources of the possible; however improbable the happenings in a detective story, they can and must be explained in terms that satisfy the reason. But in a ghost story, where natural laws are dispensed with, the whole point is that the happenings cannot be so explained. A ghost story that is capable of a rational explanation is as much an anomaly as a detective story that isn__. The one is in revolt against a materialistic conception of the universe, whereas the other depends on it.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

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.

In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice__e cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? Sacrifice for what? Demand what sort of order? He doesn't know.If a value has lost its concrete content, what is left of it? A mere empty form; an imperative that goes unheeded and, all the more furious, demands to be heard and obeyed. The less Esch knows what he wants, the more furiously he wants it. Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value. Justice, order__sch seeks them now in the trade union struggle, then in religion; today in police power, tomorrow in the mirage of America, where he dreams of emigrating. He could be a terrorist or a repentant terrorist turning in his comrades, or a party militant or a cult member a kamikaze prepared to sacrifice his life. All the passions rampaging through the bloody history of our time are taken up, unmasked, and terrifyingly displayed in Esch's modest adventure.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.

CS Lewis may make difficult questions accessible. I don't think he makes answers 'easy. _ Debra Winger

The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student__ndeed, no grade-school dropout_ doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species__ncluding monkeys and humans__re related through descent from a common ancestor... This tactic is called 'equivocation'__hanging the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument.