“Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.”

“But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.”

“Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.”

“Altruism is for thosewho can't endure their desires.There's a worldas ambiguous as a moan,a pleasure moanour earnest neighborsmight think a crime.It's where we could live.I'll say I love you,Which will lead, of course,to disappointment,but those words unsaidpoison every next moment.I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.--Mon Semblable”

“For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.”

“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.”