“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”
— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”
— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”
But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter?— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”
“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”
— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey