Quotes About Ambivalence

Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.

I didn't have the self-promotion instinct, and I just didn't care about it. I sort of had a "beat" attitude.

It's lovely. I hate it.

Even my agents say, 'We don't know what this business is anymore.'

I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

The global business climate is likewhatever, dude.

If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.

But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

Send that, he told her. Sign it, et cetera. Work the sentences, if you wish, so that they will mean something. As she started from the office he added, Or so that they mean nothing. Whichever you prefer.

he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.

We're being paid to sit here and do nothing. So we feel all upset. First we stand up, then we sit down. We blame it on the heat, but it's really because we don't know what to do with ourselves.

Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.

a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen.

When I think about John William now, I think about someone who followed through, and then I'm glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain--even with all this cash on hand--in a way I seem to have no choice about. I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.

Tourists reminded him of other places and elicited in him a prodding doubt that living here was what he wanted.

We can't, it seems, live without [capitalism] even as we complain about it.

Seattle's ambivalence and Oklahoma City's hunger permeated everything.

But if I didn't want to be alone, then why didn't I want to be with anyone else?

i want him to give up, no. no, i don't.

Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated.

He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee.

I like everything, I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. I don't hate the world. I'm scared of it. There's a difference.

We're not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you're more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award.

Los refranes son siempre ambivalentes, a una sentencia le corresponde su opuesta, en eso consiste la sabiduría popular, en no equivocarse nunca y lo mismo a quien madruga Dios le ayuda que no por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano.