Quotes & Sayings About Not Knowing What Will Happen Next

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. — Gilda Radner

I love not knowing what's going to happen next. With work, you never know. You rehearse and strive and get it right sometimes, and still you never know. Some people are like that with their marriages. They work and strive and labour and toil at them. God, what a bore! What an unromantic bore! — Celia Imrie

Do you believe in chaos- in random, uncontrolled events, in the idea that anything can happen at any time without fixed laws governing it? If you believe that, you will always be in a state of fear, not knowing what will happen from one moment to the next. The fear might be small, but it is there. That fear results in a lack of security and a feeling of mistrust. — Chris Prentiss

I don't see how knowing why I have this fear will help stop it. That's why I don't see any point in going to a shrink. Knowing why you broke the glass
because you weren't paying attention to where the edge of the table was, dummy
doesn't mend the glass, doesn't ensure it won't happen again, that you won't break something more precious next time. — Meg Howrey

Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. She has more excuses than dogs have hairs. She must just simply dive in and stand not knowing what will happen next. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Imagine being able to plot in advance, in systematic fashion, the approach of all meaningful coincidences. Is that a priori, by the very meaning of the word, not a contradiction? After all, a coincidence, or as Pauli called it, a manifestation of synchronicity, is by its very nature not dependent on the past; hence nothing exists as a harbinger of it (cf. David Hume on the topic; in particular the train whistle versus the train). This state, not knowing what is going to happen next and therefore having no way of controlling it, is the sine qua non of the unhappy world of the schizophrenic; he is helpless, passive, and instead of doing things, he is done to. Reality happens to him
a sort of perpetual auto accident, going on and on without relief. — Philip K. Dick

Jane would be the next queen and her children, when she had them, would be the next princes or princesses. Or she might wait, as the other queens had waited, every month, desperate to know that she had conceived, knowing each month that it did not happen that Henry's love wore a little thinner, that his patience grew a little shorter. Or Anne's curse of death in childbed, and death to her son, might come true. I did not envy Jane Seymour. I had seen two queens married to King Henry and neither of them had much joy of it. — Philippa Gregory

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity. — Gilda Radner

This excited you, doesn't it? Not knowing where we're going next. What's going to happen. Who might turn that corner. Not knowing if I'm going to kiss you or fuck you. I'll give you a hint, Angie. I'm going to do both. — J. Kenner

I have no idea what will come next in my writing life or life in general. I like not knowing, but I know what I want. That doesn't mean it will happen, but I'll give it my best try. — Rita Mae Brown

John and I weren't capable of getting back to Kenwood from there, so the four of us sat up for the rest of the night as the walls moved, the plants talked, other people looked like ghouls and time stood still. It was horrific: I hated the lack of control and not knowing what was going on or what would happen next. — Cynthia Lennon

It was all a lot to take. You start the day and it's just another day and here you are, having mercifully not ended up as a highwayman, sitting in another city with nothing more than the clothes you're standing up in, not knowing what is going to happen next.
Which, in a way, was exciting. — Terry Pratchett

I open doors, I close doors," he wrote. He loved no one, he loved everyone. He loved sex, he hated sex. Life is a lie, truth is a lie. His thoughts ended with a healing wound. "I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." His manifesto as an artist. I let the confessional aspects fall away, and I accepted those words as a communion wafer. He had cast the line that would seduce me, ultimately bind us together. I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, not knowing what would happen next. — Patti Smith

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley ... He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: To Harry Potter - the boy who lived! — J.K. Rowling

I want that perfect ending. But I've learned the hard way, that some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. My life has not been about knowing or figuring everything out. It's been about having to deal with change, about taking a moment and making the best of it, even if I knew I'd have to take a big risk. Life is really about trying to move forward without knowing exactly what is going to happen next. — Jose N. Harris

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer. — E.L. Doctorow

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say. — Ernest Hemingway,

You're holding your future self responsible for something your past self didn't know anything about. You can't judge your past behavior because of the way things turned out. You had no way of knowing what would happen next. It's only because you do know that you judge your past self. — E.K. Blair

I've had the other kinds of love. Sunday love, all comfortable and familiar. Tuesday love with its caring and closeness. Saturday love where you know it's too good to be true and you'll wake up the next day and it'll all be over. Monday love, where you wonder what the hell you were thinking and the next weekend seems to be incredibly far away. Thursday love where it all seems so close and yet there's so much standing in the way. Wednesday love where you've got all this history but feel like you're in a rut and every day is the same thing. Forget all of those. Right now, I want a Friday kind of love. I want that possibility and recklessness and passion that only comes knowing there's so much that could happen, and never mind that sometimes it doesn't live up to your expectations. — Cameron Chapman

Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Walking into parties always gives me a crampy feeling at the bottom of my stomach. Its a good feeling though: The feeling of knowing anything can happen. Most of the time nothing does, of course. Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we die. — Lauren Oliver

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living. — Sam Shepard