Quotes About Ambivalence

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.

Western men are openly hostile toward the Christian faith, I believe most are simply ambivalent toward it. What's more troubling, the men who do go to church seem to become more passive and detached by the

But you're happy?' 'Yeah? I think I am. Are you?' 'Happier. Happyish.' 'Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.' 'It's the most we can hope for.

I love him, she thought, I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him.

Bad things happen in nice places, and nice things happen in bad places. But that doesn't mean the places themselves are hard to tell apart.

Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it ambivalence: a collision between thought and feeling.

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and suddenly wanted to do both.

I like you a little more than I want to but not nearly as much as you think I do.

My feelings towards my father were ambivalent in the extreme. I vacillated between craving his attention and hoping never again to hear his name. Love and hate are not incompatible emotions, I reflected. And while I neither loved nor hated him, I would never be indifferent to the man who had sired me.

You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite.

Endings and beginnings sit so close to each other that it's sometimes impossible to tell which is which.

It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't everything either.

Neither pathway is correct.

Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.

At little more than kin and less than kind.

Y cuando uno espera demasiado, se le acaba creando un sentimiento ambivalente o contradictorio: descubre que se ha acostumbrado a esperar y que tal vez no quiera otra cosa.

There were little velvet handcuffs and small whips involved. I'm not opposed to little velvet handcuffs and small whips in principle, you understand. At least, I don't think I am. I haven't actually tried any of those things. But somehow in that particular context they did not appeal.

AINSI JE RESTE SEUL, oublié de lui qui dort dans mes bras. La mer est calme. Je n'ose bouger. Sa présence serait plus terrible que son voyage hors de moi. Peut­ être vomirait-il sur ma poitrine. Et qu'y pourrais-je faire ? Trier ses vomissures ? y chercher parmi le vin, la viande, la bile, ces violettes et ces roses qu'y délayent et délient les filets de sang ?

What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege - while the battle rages all around - to disengage.

Was this first contact, or last contact?

Even when you are happy to see your friends again and laugh at their jokes, the relief is mixed with sadness and, maybe, guilt. It

I don't know. It depends on the day. Depends on the hour of the day...I don't really know if I really want to do that. I think I do and then I think I don't. It makes me really nervous to think about really doing it.