Quotes About Ambivalence

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

He hurt everywhere, so at least he must be alive. Another comforting thought because, despite everything, he wanted to be alive. It was the business of living he wanted nothing to do with.

As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree, and the locusts sang off in the distance.

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

From the beginning, there have been some religious leaders who greeted the funding of faith-based social services by government with ambivalence.

I really don't know if I should smile or frown? All I know is that right now I feel like I'm slowly breaking down.

My heart and my head are two of my worst enemies. They are like the devil and angel, only I can't figure out which one is which...

Every coin has two sides, just like most people have two faces.

I don't know which face to talk to, since you have two.

Too bored to stay home. Too lazy to go out.

I'm not ignoring your calls because I'm angry, I'm ignoring them because I'm ambivalent. Being mad means that you care. I'm just over it.

I love you; but I hate you; I miss you but I'm better off without you; I want you out of my life; But I never want to let you go.

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.

But a distaste rose in me now when I looked at him. One moment I would be laughing, and the next his jests turned sour in my throat.

They are not naturally fools, it is only that they are caught between two scorpions.

I don't either," he said. "I thought I might, but I don't." The days turned, and the months, and two years passed.

On the one hand, the idea of marriage and the sort of traditional family life repulses me. But on the other hand, I long for it, you know what I mean? I'm constantly in conflict with things. And it is because of my past and my upbringing and the journey that I've been on.

In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.

She hadn't ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did

Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third.

The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?