Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.

Confusion is not an ignoble condition

The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

God, our world is so complicated.

Were all the letters sun, I could not see one.

O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

None of us truly knows what we'll do when the circumstances become so overwhelming and complex that we can't even tell right from wrong.

Ambiguity — the Devil's volleyball.

Modern life is confusing no "Ms take" about it.

It is easiest to lose your way in the forest after it is cut.

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball.

To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.

There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.