Uncertainty
Page 3
- Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for.
- Humans love to find patterns and to make sense of what we see. When you can’t find those patterns, it’s unsettling. The CDC tells us that we have to social distance, and then the president is on TV without a mask, shaking people’s hands. Doctors say if you feel sick you should get a test, but the tests are nowhere to be found. Your kids can’t go into a classroom, even though it’s the middle of the school year. You can’t find flour on the grocery shelves. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or six months from now. We don’t know how many people will die before this is over. The future is completely up in the air.
- There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.
- No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse.
- I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
- I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
- Relax; the world's not watching that closely. It's too busy contemplating itself in the mirror.
- If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.
- And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.
- You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
- Doubt everything. Find your own light.
- We work in the dark, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.