Quotes About Ambivalence

You can't do anything for a person who is stuck between being happy and being miserable. All you can do is get trapped in the middle, and anyone in the middle just gets squished.' -Grandma

As I sit with pen in hand, I am wondering, "Just what the hell do you think you are doing, Kelly?" I ask myself all the questions: how and why and will they be able to understand; can you spell good enough to get this message across? I keep coming up with the same answer: "Give it a try"- this as you see, is what I will do.

Are you sure you want me to go after Christina? Lately I've kind of thought I might just give up on that. Plus, didn't you and I need to gaze into each other's eyes first? How will I know how to gaze at Christina? And my pebble kicking? Disaster.

La poésie […] n'existe, ne s'absente, ne surgit, que pour refuser la réponse. Et pour s'approcher de la question[…] elle ne réponde pas aux questions, elles les pose.

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

She neither understood him nor believed him but she realized, with puzzlement, that now the man was being nice, though she did not even want him to be nice to her mother, she did not want him to be anything, to anybody, anywhere.

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

This dull, difficult novel I have brought with me on my trip—I keep trying to read it. I have gone back to it so many times, each time dreading it and each time finding it no better than the last time, that by now it has become something of an old friend. My old friend the bad novel.

At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

There are many men, and a large number, who, though they do not wish to be rid of God, do not very much care to have him.

The hand that records is also what makes everything unclear.

I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

Rage and grief, thwarted desire, lust, self-pity: these are emotions gods know well. But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.

But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.

My ambivalence, of course, only encouraged him. Any challenge was a game, and any game a pleasure. If I had loved him, he would have been gone, yet my revulsion brought him back and back. He

Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster?

I just don't know. Maybe I'm good, but that goddamn scale would hesitate a long time before tilting that way.

There are lives to be lived if only you didn't care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits . . .?

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.

She would give herself violently, then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day cleaning up the flat, cooking, ironing. Then, pass the next three or four Boheminanly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women's magazines, a detective story, Hemingway. Not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

She loved Manhattan and could not imagine living anywhere else, but her world was upside down now, and, well, there was nothing certain in her future.

Yes, he had practically saved my life. He had also practically lost it for me.