Alan Paton Quotes

The world is noisy and messy. You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.

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.

The meanings get lost and the teachings get tossed and you don't know what you're going to do next.

They took each other's advice, opened one book, went over to another, then did not know what to decide when opinions diverged so widely.

We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction. There are many voices of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much excitement and feverish activity, but little concert of thoughtful purpose. We are distressed by our own ungoverned, undirected energies and do many things, but nothing long. It is our duty to find ourselves.

Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.

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.

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball.

Things are really weird around here, and most of us don't know everything. Half of everything.

With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

If you don't know what you want, don't say you never had a chance.

Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.

I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more and more chaos. The pieces—they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that.

We all question our sanity. Everyone has had an experience of loss of control of something.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

Progress was a labyrinth ... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it ... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution ... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school.