The positive saving virtue of vagueness.
—Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother

Obscurity was my tonic, and I believed in and practiced incuriosity.
—Cyril Connolly, “Conversations in Berlin”

Embittered and uncertain, masquerading as mordant and self-assured.
—Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Style is a didactic impulse that strives to banish doubt, a form of certainty about everything elusive and uncertain.
—Lisa Cohen, All We Know

Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.
—Anna Kavan, Ice

In reality uncertainty is not spinelessness, it is the first step on the bumpy path to responsible conviction.
—Becca Rothfeld, “Sanctimony Literature”

Everything, no matter what it is, that falls within our knowledge and enjoyment, we find unsatisfactory; and we go gaping after things to come and unknown.
—Michel de Montaigne, “Of a Saying of Caesar’s”

That uncertain, glancing quality that is the hallmark of the present.
—Olivia Laing, To the River

My vagueness about my movements arises partly from a quite general unwillingness to think of the future as definite.
—Iris Murdoch, letter

Très Perdu.
—Erik Satie, performance direction for “Gnossiene No. 3”

When you are unsure of a route it is natural to put your trust in precedence.
—Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways

The intoxication which comes of a deed hallowed in tradition but uncertainly remembered in detail.
—Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

When embarked on a lie, and uncertain of your footing, cling to the lie no matter what.
—Tucker Coe, Don’t Lie to Me

I hate the mysterious, because it’s the perfect medium for liars, the place where they go to multiply and preen and lie to each other.
—Norman Rush, Mortals

My father really hated clarity.
—Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones

I rather like clarity. It’s more frightening.
—Elizabeth Jane Howard, interview

Clarity begins at home. Knowledge puffeth up, but clarity edifieth. Clarity suffereth long.
—D. J. Enright, Interplay

The truth was always worth relation, ran his splendid if vague belief.
—Peter Quennell, Four Portraits, on James Boswell

Take silence for example—what failures in clarity it prevents.
—Mary Ruefle, from “Heaven on Earth”

Anything that has to be hidden is a burden.
—Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

No lust is like the lust for the hidden.
—Stefan Zweig, Confusion

He seemed to have no present; only a long, uncertain past about which I knew nothing.
—Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit

It was one of those times when you have to decide between your own convenience and the unknown quantity of another man’s troubles.
—Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters

Uncertainty was his stock in trade, and judging between uncertainty and unknowability his unique talent.
—Hugh Aldersey-Williams, In Search of Thomas Browne

I am sure that most of the influences responsible for one’s cast of mind are too remote and mysterious to be known.
—Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

I knew that if anything could make me mad it would be someone rummaging in my subconscious and dragging out all kinds of disgusting horrors—why does a mind have a subconscious if it’s not for keeping things hidden?
—Diana Athill, Don’t Look at Me Like That

The psyche has its hidden life and so do the streets.
—Hilary Mantel, New Yorker

The usually hidden glory of ordinary things.
—Stephen King, Elevation

In autumn there were days of fog that called the truth of everyday experience into question.
—Esther Kinsky, River

How shall I part, and whither wander down
Into a lower world, to this obscure
And wild?
—John Milton, Paradise Lost

Free yourself from the town. Trip down to the beach, past the saint-huts and the drowned fire pits. Die to your town self.
—Margo Lanagan, from “Kites in the fog”

As a precaution against everything troublesome, carry the right eye of a wolf with you at all times, hidden in your right sleeve.
—Shirley Jackson, “Hex Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”

While a known danger strengthens a leader’s authority, the unknown brings him closer to the level of his men.
—Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter”

He was of a type, unknown in the New World but quite common in Europe, which is fascinated by obscurity and failure.
—Evelyn Waugh, Scott-King’s Modern Europe

Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure & remote: of that which rests on its own intrinsic & silent merit.
—William Hazlitt, “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon”

I have always been working hard for a more perfect lucidity, and it never pleases me to be taken as willfully obscure or esoteric.
—Hart Crane, letter

Dear me, I ought to read some hideously obscure poems.
—Virginia Woolf, diary, April 11, 1932

To be properly and perfectly vague, one has to be vague about something.
—Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother

Let us not intentionally obscure a clear state of affairs.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

The novelist’s capacity to deduce the unknown from the known.
—Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life

Above all things, avoid vagueness.
—William Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing”