Indecision Quotes

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
"Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?"
      And he to me: "This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
      They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
      The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Accept me or kill me MacKayla. But choose. Fucking Choose.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
― William James

“She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.”
― Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?

“Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think.”
― Pope Benedict XVI

“Having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“Money isn't the solution to your problems. It only lets you carry your unhappiness around in style.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I don’t do anything with my life except romanticise and decay with indecision”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision”
― John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

“By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.”
― Robert Harris, Enigma

“He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn't learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today.

I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142)”
― Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

“It turns out that indecision is a path itself; but figuratively, a vertical path - up or down - meaning it isn't always a fruitless path. One is forgotten, but the other is glorified. To be what they call 'middle-of-the-road' in most cases just means you have a hard time figuring out who between options is dumber. So quite often those who refused to decide were, after all, the bold individuals, the influential ones, the creative ones, those who snatched their own authority.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“He sat where he was, on Mouse, in the grip of terrible indecision. He almost wished something would happen—a sudden attack of Mexicans or something. He might be killed, but at least he wouldn’t have to make a choice between disobeying Mr. Gus and disobeying Lorena.”
― Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“..it just seemed as if she were marking time while life rocketed past.”
― Soheir Khashoggi, Nadia's Song

“Policy making invariably involves taking measured risks in the face of uncertainty, for one has neither a prior template nor the luxury of indecision.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, I Do What I Do

“Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.”
― Janet Beizer

“The worst thing is to have all that clout and not know your own mind. If she says her (Marilyn Monroe's)favorite color is beige, that has to be a definite possibility. Then she will be as dangerous as a Chinese Empress.”
― Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me: Six Months on the Set With Marilyn and Olivier

“Why do you hover in the mid-course?”
― Guigo, The Meditations of Guigo, I: Prior of the Charterhouse (Cistercian Studies Series)

“But most importantly, if I go, if I hide... I'll never know if I'm good enough to make it here. And while I might not survive if I stay, I'm not sure I can live with myself if I leave.”
― Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing

“All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,—wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,—I never saw one walk,— and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,—for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;—and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods

“Life is an individual journey, so be ready to make decisions on crossroads.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“It’s not, I’m damned if I do, I’m damned if I don’t. It’s, I love myself if I do, I love myself if I don’t. Minor shift, major results!”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“Try to sleep on things, instead of letting your impulsiveness or anxiety take over. A lot of clarity comes after rest.”
― Robin S. Baker

“His eyes were the colour of a sky I'd never see again if I refused to kill him, a colour I'd never get out of my mind, never forget no matter how many times I painted it. He shook his head, those eyes growing so large the white showed all around. He would never see that sky, either. And neither would these people, if I failed.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Doubt will creep in. Life will interfere at times, whether that means distractions, financial obligations, or health detours. Yet, in each of these situations you can learn skills and disciplines that can serve as steppingstones. They might not make sense now, but each one can offer something valuable for the next season.”
― Emily Grabatin, Dare to Decide: Discovering Peace, Clarity and Courage at Life's Crossroads

“When paralyzed at a crossroads, our stress is often centered around the pieces we don’t know. We worry about the future. We seek to make the unknowns known. We try to pin down the things we can’t control. How can we look at our paths from a place of hope rather than fear?”
― Emily Grabatin, Dare to Decide: Discovering Peace, Clarity and Courage at Life's Crossroads

“I'm all screwed up because I've looked into things more than is good for my own health; don't know why the hell I read so much. That's why I'm here all paralysed.”
― Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment