the unknown Quotes

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”

“When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla.”

“The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on foreknowledge of safety, for himself or for others,” said Aragorn. “There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark.”

“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”

“At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn’t yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who’d entrusted the deceased with their hearts.”

“But if we’d told you then, you might not have gone.”

“None knows what the new day shall bring him.”

“I sat, staring at a photo of Lucy and me from medical school, dancing and laughing; it was so sad, those two, planning a life together, unaware, never suspecting their own fragility.”

“Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don’t know. And so it’s not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future—that is, beyond lunch.”

“And for once, Donald Rumsfeld, in the news at the time over the Iraq war made sense to me: “As we know,” he said, famously, “there are known knowns-things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns-things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns- things we don’t know we don’t know.”

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”

“Don’t question me! The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.”

“When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.”

“You’re playing with Pandora’s box. Sometimes it’s better not to open it. Sometimes, it’s better not to know.”

“Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.”

“Today, to him gazing south with a new-born need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over their long low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; today, the unseen was everything. The unknown, the only real fact of life.”

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all.”

“No one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. ”

“Centuries ago migration was a leap into the unknown. It was an enormous intellectual and emotional commitment.”

“The name Manzanar meant nothing to us when we left Boyle Heights. We didn’t know where it was or what it was. We went because the government ordered us to.”

“Moving under what appeared to be government protection, to an area less directly threatened by the war seemed not such a bad idea at all. For some it actually sounded like a fine adventure.”

″ One never learns how the witch became wicked. ”

“I don’t know what I don’t see, what I don’t fear!”

“Miles and Flora saw more — things terrible and unguessable.”

“Salva made up his mind. He would walk south, to Kenya. He did not know what he would find once he got there, but it seemed to be his best choice.”

“I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.”

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.”

“All of us . . . are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it.”

“He packed up his things and raced out of the station. He was hungry and tired and had no idea where he would go.”

“The tears that finally streamed from her eyes were tears not of mourning but of relief, and tears for the dark unknown that lay ahead of her.”

″You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything...affects everything.”

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.”

“The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of this society to a zone unknown.”

“It’s best not to know your fate beforehand; you’ll live happier if you don’t.”

“Far below them, in the City of New York, something like pandemonium was breaking out. A great round ball as big as a house had been sighted hovering high up in the sky over the very center of Manhattan, and the cry had gone up that it was an enormous bomb sent over by another country to blow the whole city to smithereens.”

“The slave girl didn’t have a name; she didn’t know how old she was. She had lived at Huangling Palace since her parents had sold her to Lan when she was a small child.”

“Things happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.”

“He thought: How difficult is it to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.”

“They didn’t know being dead is only being asleep, and you’re bound to wake up somewhere or other, either where you go to sleep or some better place.”

“Her own future was close-folded still; but she leaned her head against the sun-warmed door, and closing her eyes, whispered, just as if she had been a child saying her prayers: ‘God bless aunt Miranda; God bless the brick house that was; God bless the brick house that is to be!‘”

“You’re leaving a place you know and heading into the unknown with nothing to protect you. No money. No prospect of work. No address where folks will make you welcome.”

“David thought that if a ray of light from the sun could have made a drop of water speak, its voice would have been like the clearest notes of the violin.”

“I suppose what scares me is giving in to the unknown.”

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

“If I had known what the next six years of my life were going to be like, I would have eaten more.”

“I wouldn’t have complained about brushing my teeth, or taking a bath, or going to bed at eight o’clock every night. I would have played more. Laughed more. I would have hugged my parents and told them I loved them. But I was ten years old, and I had no idea of the nightmare that was to come. None of us did.”

″‘You see, now,’ observed Geppetto, ‘that I was right when I said to you that it did not do to accustom ourselves to be too particular or too dainty in our tastes. We can never know, my dear boy, what may happen to us.”

“You never know what is waiting for you on the other side of your hope.”

“Everything that happened before today feels different now, and I have no idea what happens after this.”

“We cannot do exactly what they did. But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God. This is not the place in which to speculate what our great and mysterious vocation might involve. That is still unknown. Let it suffice for me to say that we need to learn from these men of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion and strike out fearlessly into the unknown.”

“This is the role of the mother. And in that visit I really saw clearly, for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and also cuddles... but because in an interesting and and maybe an eerie and other worldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.”

“Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.”

“But in Australia a model child is - I say it not without thankfulness- an unknown quantity. It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in the sunny brilliancy, of our atmosphere. It may be that the land and the people are young-hearted together, and the children’s spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years’ sorrowful history.”

“The mode and the hour were all that occupied or distracted me.”

“There are hundreds of worries and even sorrows that may come along, but- I think what I really mean is that Rose won’t be wanting things to happen. She will want things to stay just as they are. She will never have the fun of hoping something wonderful and exciting may be just round the corner.”

“Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.”

“There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown.”

“I pause. Something about this doesn’t feel right. I’ve had to rely on my instincts quite a lot over the years. And I’ve also been here before. Hand clasped around the door handle. Not knowing what I’m going to find on the other side-”