Jamaica Kincaid (1949) Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer
Source: The Autobiography of My Mother
“I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.”
"The Lottery in Babylon"; tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Variant: I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.
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Jorge Luis Borges213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986Related quotes
“I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian
Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
Variant translation: When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
“There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.”
Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist
Reported as attributed to Burns but unverified in Suzy Platt (ed.), Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service (Washington, DC : Library of Congress 1989) http://www.bartleby.com/73/172.html <br class="br">Disputed <br class="br">Source: Collected Poems of Robert Burns
Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses
Variant: Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
Source: All the Pretty Horses
“The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)
Context: If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures- none lives so long a man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even even a single year in perfect serenity.
“Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.”
William Congreve Love for Love
Act IV, scene xx
Love for Love (1695)
Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer
Re: can lisp do what perl does easily? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/fc76ebab1cb2f863 (Usenet article). <br class="br">Usenet articles, Perl