I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.
Interpretation
Certainty limits discussion while doubt encourages exploration and conversation.
In this quote, John Patrick Shanley suggests that certainty represents a complacent state where no further questioning is welcome, effectively closing off dialogue. In contrast, doubt is seen as a catalyst for inquiry and understanding, allowing for more opportunities for exploration and deeper engagement in discussions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate to emphasize the importance of questioning assumptions.
I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap.
Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.
Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.
Bottles of wine aren't like paintings. At some point you have to consume them. The object in life is to die with no bottles of wine in your cellar. To drink your last bottle of wine and go to sleep that night and not wake up.
It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.